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Wen-Tack PDF/Wen-tack reëvaluated
🕑 Added 2021-09-28 16:38:08 +0000 UTCSorry again for the slim pickings in recent weeks. I'm down to drawing the last nine pages of Steeple volume 3, pages that will run in January next year, and I feel like a man at the end of a marathon. As controversial as this may sound, I'm going to allow myself a break of a few weeks once I'm done pumping out pages like old Gutenberg Bible himself.
In the absence of red hot content, I thought I'd post up a (now-offline) story that represents on the one hand a low creative watermark for recent years, but in truth, a sort of superhuman effort - WEN-TACK. (it's linked at the bottom as a PDF).
I've said a few times here that I don't think this story was very good. I think it's the only story where someone has written to me while it was happening to say that they thought I'd lost my goose. I really had lost my goose though.
I wrote Wen-Tack at the start of 2018, when I was also working on Giant Days and By Night for Boom! Studios. So that was 44 pages a month I was writing, but I still wanted to draw some webcomics (I had that long, largely uninterrupted run to keep up and I felt the need to keep it going) so I had a go at running on empty. At a rate of five quite densely drawn little strips a week.
I'm not going to knock these weird little comics or myself. I think they're sub-par for a valid and excusable reason. The point at which one of the characters is just Louie from Taxi right down to his outfit, that's a clue that things are getting challenging for me.
Anyway, the story peters out at the end in a manner that led someone to express concern. But now when I look through it, I can tell, I was really trying. I was dying, but I was trying. Here are five panels I think deserved a better home than by the road to a nervous breakdown.
The Lunar Sea Trilogy's plot is very similar to the plot for a big-two series I got quite a long way along with before realising that writing superhero comics is, how can I put this, not something I ever want to do, no matter how talented the editors are and how skilled the artists are.
I should add that the development work for this series was going on while I was writing both By Night and Giant Days. Ha ha! Hahahaha! [SCREAMS]
Mildred's video nasty "MOBE". A bit near the knuckle, T-B-H. But I have nothing against the granting of renewed mobility through scooting.
"We want road", that's good stuff.
This story interpolated characters and a few elements from a (very) unfinished Charlotte solo story called Babysitter Of The Year.
I really liked the characters in this story. I don't think I can go back to the streets of Tackleford to bring them back now (I don't particularly want to, I want to keep widening the net) but though undercooked, I enjoyed their designs and little relationships. This was a salutary lesson in not putting things out before they're ready, because these four could have been used for something completely new.
One learns more in failure than success, of course. And as I say, there's plenty there.
But again, sorry for the limited sketch posts as I reach the end of the book. I'd like to put up more written pieces here so if there is an area of comic creation that interests you, let me know in the comments.
Comments
Lovely to re-visit. The climactic off-panel mid-tunnel kiss is a beautiful fever dream of an ending.
Gavin Sheedy
You are way too hard on yourself. This is genius.
