Betwen 2000-2002 ‘Phantom Reality’ was the lame working title of a little hardly-feasible hardly interesting story about Arakawa Satoshi, a young japanese martial artist in her mid-twenties and Takeshi, the guy she loves... and their unwilling involvement in the events leading to the 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway (yeah, serious business).The Characters and story:
The hook was definitely the main character. Sato started as a random chick hastily sketched in my notebook, wearing a hakama and sporting a ponytail so ridiculously huge that you could have used it as a body pillow or a small emergency raft (She also swung a pair of nunchucks… wtf?). I let her to sit there for a while but she came back in so many of my other sketches that I gave her a name and story. She had mastered jiu-jistu, iai-jutsu, kenpo, wing chun kung-fu and aikido (yeah, I was just piling it on). Since she had dedicated much of her life to the martial arts since childhood, her studies suffered immensely. Sato was a strange gal. Highly profficient but socially awkward and withdrawn, so… bit of a geeky MMA dreamgirl.
Takeshi, was her aikido sparring opponent and the guy she was slowly warming to. He shared her interest in martial arts, but was nowhere near her level of skill. Also, he was slightly less confident and carried his own brand of social awkwardness, most of which was based on the blundering scared-of-women japanese youth stereotype. There was going to be a push-pull romantic tension until the story’s ending.
Kimi was the cute-friend-from-way-back-when who supported Sato through her studies. Think a blond-bleached ganguro but without the fake tan and ugly makeup as well as some actual smarts despite the look. She was the annoyingly-genki anime-fan with good-grades stereotype.
Miko was a singer (bit of a cross between Tarja Turunen and a generic j-pop idol) whose role in the story I had yet to decide. In fact she was just a character I thought ‘hmmm’ gotta find a way to include her… Fail. :P
Now, Takahashi Genzai was the guy who started the whole mess. He was also a martial artist (no shit!) in his late 40s, with a shadowy background in the JSDF and some unstated dirty deeds. Genzai had mob connections and was contracted by a third party to assist the Aum Shinrikyo sect in their attack. He was slowly grooming Takeshi to be his replacement if anything happened to him. His employers get a hold of Takeshi and get him involved as a means of leverage to ensure Genzai’s collaboration. Of course, Sato gets in the way before Takeshi gets seriously hurt.
Piling on useless details, PR’s plot was setup thus : Sato would lead her normal life, go to school everyday, socialize (awkwardly) with the other characters, the usual college-student rigamarole. But once in a while she would get a daydream about some serious events happening in her alternate reality, which took place in edo-era japan (hence the stupid-sounding title). Those daydreams would reveal upcoming events to her (meeting with Genzai, conflict with a dangerous religious group, stopping a friend from getting involved with them, etc..) The comic was to be laid out online-manga-style with no gag/punchline. I was really into manga at that particular time and the humor was at all not my goal. I even thought of posting them in chapters instead of single pages (which makes for a horrible business model, if you think about it).
Main inspirations :
The terrorist attack itself, chinese astrology, Rurouni Kenshin, Megatokyo, 3x3 Eyes, Jackie Chan movies, The Rock (for the poison gas) and even Metal Gear Solid.
Why it failed to happen :
It was a broken horsecart with the horses pulling in over 87 directions. That and the title was lame. The characters were hard to grok and at the same time too stereotypical to even get emotionally attached to. Sato was a tomboy, Kimi was an epic-level schoolgirl. Miko was a horrible ripoff of Priss Asagiri with little in the way of actual personnality, not to mention I hadn’t even found a use for her character. Takeshi was bland and old Genzai was…. Nah he was kind of cool… in a Mifune Toshiro kind of way… Ok I’ll shut up now… :S
But the final nail in its coffin was that it was ridicullously noobish. It was an amateurish take on a subject I hardly understood. (This was also before wikipedia got big and became a valid ressource. My research would have been facilitated with easier access to a wide variety of proper reading materials.) Truth be told, I just needed a historical event to act as a ‘timeline anchor’ that would give a sense of time and place to my story, not to forget some much needed credibility (which it obviously didn’t have on its own). But writing valid fiction about something extremely serious like a terrorist attack perpetrated by obscure groups for motives you hardly understand is a) pretentious and b) a complete lack of respect for the people directly concerned (Japanese citizens as a whole, the victims, etc etc etc….). So it just died in its infancy.
One of these days I might be tempted to ressurect Sato just for the fun of drawing her, but I wouldn’t exactly consider going ahead with this loose-thread story.
The upside :
PR gave me a host of characters designs to draw, draw, draw and draw again in the vain hopes that they would one day devellop into something potable. Additionally, the focus on martial arts and hand-to-hand combat gave me the impetus to learn how to draw aggressive characters in motion. It also turned my french, english and humanities cegep classes into doodling workshops *snicker*.
Moving on!
The chronicles of Emergalv is a fantasy world I’ve been working on since 2002 or so. It has taken many forms over the years since its original inception, but it began as a webcomic idea. And the world is gigantic. Just like PR, it started with a single sketch of a female character with cool warpaint on her face (I’m not making myself sound very serious, eh?). The Characters and story:
I had originally planned it to be a family feud in my best tolkien-meets-shakespeare style, but I found the personnal story of the character Gresha, was more interesting. It was about her royal family’s eradication at the hands of a rival claimant to the throne, her dangerous exile to the southern lands and subsequent adoption by its people the Noerban (think Paul Atreides amongst the Fremen, only… said Fremen are all amazon-like chicks. Can anyone say ‘one-track-minded’ ?).
What was at first a simplistic revenge story evolved into a world of its own with varied cultures, political agendas, plot twists and the neverending conflicts both petty and large-scale. Early enough in the process I decided not to head down the ‘old road’ and eliminated all non-humans from the story. I thought, no elves, no dwarves, no magic, no bullshit. Not that I don’t enjoy classic tolkienesque fiction off and on, but I thought I’d create something more to my liking : A dark, gritty medieval world with some unique elements (like unexplained supernatural events that stayed unexplained) and of course some thinly-veiled references to our own History. It made for an interesting setting, and I spent more time actually writing for it than actually drawing characters.
When offered to dee-emm for an AD&D game with some of my friends (some of whom had never even tried tabletop roleplaying) I was at a loss to pick any one setting that I thought I could use well. Which left me to use what I had already written up as a test of its quality. My audience didn’t know what to expect, and they seemed to like it, so I was satisfied with that. I even found ways to throw in some NPCs that were originally supposed to be characters in the strip, like the mighty Vohanna of Clervol and the lord Ulrich the Restless (hehe).
Main inspirations :
Errant story, Emerald Winter, generic D&D, A Song of Ice and Fire, Warhammer, Morrowind and the art of Kristen ‘Merekat’ Perry, Larry Elmore and Boris Vallejo.
Why it failed to happen :
After experimenting with a few storyboards, I started feeling that, as a medium, a manga-style comic strip lended itself poorly to a world of this scope. At last, I completely scrapped the ‘comic’ idea and concentrated on the roleplaying sessions with my gaming group. When the game was left on hiatus and the group later dissolved (and my breakup with one of the players and the departure of another to Japan might have contributed, but hey, we had some fun) I left things as they were and moved on to other things. There was some significant overlap between the ‘webcomic idea’ phase and the roleplaying sessions. When the games stopped and the time came to actually get back to drawing a comic, I found my interest had shifted and I was no longer ‘in the mood’ to create a webcomic about it.
The upside :
I got a kickass series of non-generic D&D sessions out of it, as well as some awesome human cultures to use in my fiction writing. I’d say I got much further than PR. I have a lot of writing and graphics under my belt that is Emergalv material just waiting to be used (characters, timelines, maps, descriptions, etc). One day, I might just write a roleplay setting (fluff only sans gaming system) and publish it online as a PDF.
At some point I began writing out some scripts for a comic project called Given time and Cough Syrup. It was about a local metal band trying to get together and have some practices. Jokes would be based on looking for a band name, band disagreements, song lyrics, composition trouble, eclectic musical genres, and general metal fandom in general.
The Characters and story :
I didn’t even have a single sketch prepared, but you know what metalheads look like. :P
While the comic would have some noticeable story elements, the whole idea was to make it a gigantic farce, so no drama, no tragedy, just light humour poking fun at the things we metalheads love.
Main inspirations :
a defunct webcomic called Nova Next Exit, Metalocalypse, Questionnable Content, Nothing Nice to Say and my own love of the metal genre and experience starting punk/metal bands.
Why it failed to happen :
I felt that I would run out of joke material too soon and would need a good comic writer to help me with the humour. With only 2-3 scripts written, I didn’t really get into the project and moved on to other things before I could find someone willing.
The upside : Err… cheap laughs at 3:00 in the morning while writing my scripts?
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