gs_silva

Holidays are material for mutual discovery in Alien Romance, as characters from different cultures and backgrounds become acquainted with each other's traditions. I've been skipping ahead a little on Draft 3 to the scenes that take place in Lyon, France, because they take place in and around Christmas, and I don't want to be starting that work in February when I'm thoroughly not in the mood. In fact, Maurice and Cathy first meet just before Christmas, go on one café date, and then their second date is a New Year's Eve pub crawl. Well, it was going to be. Somebody sabotaged it, so they end up sitting on a park bench with no shoes.

Oh no, I was going to put a cut here, but I forgot how. Oh well. If you want to skip it, just skim.

French Christmases are less flashy, more observant, and she dresses up for Mass (which I drew in LA Fourvière, so sue me, it's pretty and easy to get reference photos of the interior) and then attends a feast with extended family. Lumières, the big Festival of Lights event that takes over Lyon, hasn't been established yet, and anyway it ends before Maurice arrives. Before it became a grand municipal spectacle, it was just candles in the windows, so I drew some of that. And I drew Maurice walking through the famous market, eating a carrot for dinner in a nod to my own lean times.

The following Christmas, Cathy gets to experience it American style! A retail paradise! And I actually explored this with an important plotline that ended up getting bumped to Halloween. Cathy has no interest in mall Santa. She doesn't get confounded by mountains of gifts because they're all on tight budgets so they only give each other small token gifts. She does buy Maurice a shopping bag full of gifts, but soon learns that was a mistake.

Maurice comes from a small Midwestern farming community where most everyone is Christian and the holiday is a little more like a picture print by Currier and Ives. (Just a little!) Maurice and his parents own the local grocery general, so they sell the goods that make Christmas happen for everyone else in the county. But they don't do much to celebrate, themselves. Old Isaac may or may not have a Russian Orthodox tradition in his family background; he's never practiced it himself. It could also be a Muslim background, as the name 'Arzamastsev' is fairly common in southern Siberia and around Kazakhstan. Simone is Vietnamese and was only peripherally familiar with Catholic trappings when she arrived, so she minds her own business, and her business is retail.

Maurice has personal hangups about gift-giving in general. He feels like there must be a point or a philosophy behind it that he's missing, because his parents never taught him. And, sure, he had all of his good red-blooded American friends and neighbors to learn from, but he feels culturally alienated from them in a way that they wouldn't understand and would get personally offended over if he tried to explain it.

Ren is one of those friends from back home. He and Maurice are comfortable with each other's quirks, and Ren doesn't try to contextualize or challenge Maurice's discomfort with gifts. They clash over other things, though. They're both maturing rapidly, and growing in different directions, and the power balance between them is getting upended. I never dive into Ren's personal experience with Christmas. His experience with religion is complicated. Right now he's in a period of spiritual transition, but the foundation he has to build his spiritual life on is unstable.

More later, maybe.

A creative process post. I used to do this type of post on my indyblog, and I meant to carry on the tradition here. So here we go.

A friend asked me about my hair, and I said I keep it the way it is because it's very distinctive. In spite of social pressure to change it, I refuse. I've found it very useful in life to have distinctive hair, especially in China.

(Anyway, social pressure, haha, what is that?!? I can't hear you.)

I chose some distinctive features for my Alien Romance characters with some storytelling behind them. Characters in visual media benefit from being distinctive from each other, mm hmm, yada yada. I actually didn't try to hard to do that! The character concepts did it for me. Ren and Maurice having a 15-inch height difference was all in good fun, to start with. Cathy had to be shorter than Maurice, because his stated goal at one point was to be the tall one in the relationship, and I'm shorter than Maurice, so Cathy can be, too!

Christine has ambiguous gender features because because, I don't know, she quite clearly resembles a boy and looks good in a suit. And Ren is attracted to people in the middle of the gender presentation spectrum. (Most likely to date transgender with great enthusiasm!) Christine doesn't identify as nonbinary, but she likes the aesthetics. So she's easy.

Ella is 'the pretty one' and has a big nose and curvy hips, and was modeled after sitcom characters Blair (from The Facts of Life) Major Hoolihan (from M*A*S*H) and Jennifer (from WKRP). She has a long braid at a time when long braids weren't very fashionable. Now they are, so the effect of her going fashion-rogue isn't as striking.

Jon's in a wheelchair, and sometimes crutches, so that's distinct. He also has thick blond hair, and he grew it out for a year. He cut off his ponytail just before I started posting the daily comic strip on DW. But he had it for long enough that someone marveled, "I forgot what Jon looked like with short hair! It's been so long!"

Maurice is the only one of the 6 MCs who isn't White, and his appearance is somewhat racially ambiguous, which, even while it's not affecting the plot much, is visually meaningful.

There's a lot more. I think I'll write a part 2 later.

I need to respond to the comments some of you left me, and read the links - looks like good stuff! But I woke up with a totally new approach to a scene I'm struggling with, so I've been spending the day working out the logistics of this new scene. How do I do that? I don't know! Half of it was wispy dream-thoughts and barely remembered mental images. I thought up all the dialogue, but now it's late and I've probably forgotten it by now. That's okay. I can always rewrite dialogue. I do it over and over again. It's one of my little quirks as a comic creator. Dialogue gets done first, middle, middle again, and last, and then one more pass, and then run through critique, and then rewritten again.

I have a little trouble with brevity. I'm a naturally verbose person. So I'm always trying to trim.

The original pages weren't very well drawn, so I was going to redo them anyway, but I think the pacing in this one is better. And it doesn't require very much French. I'm lingering too much on the human figures, though. I need to get it all down.

And then I have a request for a sausage veg stir fry, so we'll do that, and then tomorrow we're going to a dance performance. Where I will either think of some new epiphany, or I'll wrack my brain for an epiphany and fail to think of one.

I'd add a screenshot, but it's a multistep process and I have to go cook dinner. I forgot what a production it was to compose posts on LJ, well, DW.

I think I'm going to skip my daily comic today. I'm working on continuity instead, and it's an absolute bear of a task. My mother is reading Reader's Digest jokes to me out loud while I work. So it's probably best if I do art stuff rather than script stuff.

In college I made efforts to learn to be a script supervisor. It seemed like a decent career track for me. I can draw storyboards reasonably quickly, I'm good at sitting still for extended periods of time and observing, and I'm better at being an advisor than either a leader or a follower. It didn't happen. I wasn't financially independent enough to go where the jobs were, where the film crews were, and I wasn't assertive enough to put myself out there anyhow. I got a couple of leads and let them slide for various reasons, and that was it.

But now, decades later, I'm kinda back at it. When doing a webcomic, you rush-rush a lot of the creative tasks, and end up with continuity errors in the story and the art.

Like for instance, I have a scene where Jon buys some motorcycle gloves to use as wheelchair gloves, and then I only drew them in twice more. I kept forgetting, and then forgetting I was forgetting, and meaning to go back to it, but suddenly it was time to post the page so it never got done!

I also want to cut-cut-cut a bunch of pages. The book is tooooo long. It's 386 pages, and I have more scenes I want to add that I skipped the first time, for continuity purposes, so I need to cut even more to make room for those too. Which means some more of the subplots are getting axed, in addition to the subplots I killed earlier.

Ren used to have quite a lot of subplot, and now he's just a supporting character. He never appears alone at all. He has one panel where he's doing what he wants to do, instead of the 5 or 6 entire scenes. I hate to think that the book isn't about Ren, but it isn't about Ren anymore. Sorry, guy.

My spouse thought that the early scenes should have as much taking place in France as takes place in the US, but that's difficult. Only 1 out of the 6 characters are in France until one of them takes a trip there and meets her. Then it's another 50 or so pages till they meet again, and even then it feels rushed, so I need to do that brevity thing where I rewrite entire scenes with one or two hardworking lines.

I wish I had some fresh eyes on this to help me. I have a beta reader lined up, but I think he's better for late stages. I don't want to burden him with a bunch of scenes I could've cut myself.