Analysis

Okay. Analysis. I'm going to go ahead and assume that you've already read and finished my comic, because it shouldn't take too long. If you haven't read it, go back and do so, and then come back here, because you're obviously not going to get as much out of this if you don't know what I'm talking about. Also, please read the colored version, because color is really important for this story. If the comic isn't colored at time of reading, let the comic ferment for a couple hours and it'll inexplicably grow color.

You're going to have to forgive the incredibly informal tone in which this analysis is going to be in, because at time of writing, I'm pulling my second all-nighter in the past three days to try and finish this project on time, and it wouldn't feel right to talk about my own work in essay-speak anyways. You're also going to have to forgive the fact that this is going to be way longer than you said these analyses had to be, because my comic is nineteen pages long and therefore there's a lot more to talk about than if I had just made something that was one page long.

Just as a little fun fact, I'm actually writing this during my break between cleaning up lineart, but the analysis will still be just as valid as it would be if I finished my comic completely before writing this, because I already know all of the stylistic choices I'm going to make. By the time this comic and analysis are all finished, I will definitely have spent more than 40 hours on this project, and I say this so you understand how much I want this project to end. But this analysis is to convince you that I learned something in Graphic Novels without using the not-evidence of the amount of time that has been going into this thing in the past four days, so let's get started.

I'll start by talking about the overall form of the comic and explaining why pictures are necessary. This comic is what I'd describe as an essay with pictures, because that's pretty much what it is. If you took out all of the pictures and put all of the text together, it would read as a coherent short essay about writing and why I like to write. So no, pictures probably aren't necessary, but I believe that they add a whole lot. I think that the visual aspect is just as important to the story I'm trying to tell as the text is, in this case, because the text is telling one story, and the pictures are telling a parallel but slightly different story. Yes, they're both about me and my learning about why I like to write, but one is about how I create my stories and the other is about how my stories guide me. It's important in a story called Addiction because it's not just that this is something that I like to do, but it's also become something that also defines who I am, and not necessarily in a good way.

Something that you'll notice is that I was very liberal with my panel space, especially horizontally. There's more than one reason for this, and those reasons are as follows: First, with the style I'm using, which is to say, an essay with pictures, I'm treating each page as a paragraph, which means that I write so much on each page and I can only cram so many words on each panel without making clutter. Making the panels wider and having each line of narration only one or two lines makes the art feel much less claustrophobic. Second, I really dislike drawing small, which is a large part of why I'm doing this on the computer (which is to say, I have access to a zoom function). Drawing small makes me feel cramped and claustrophobic, which is why I'm drawing the comic at twice the size that you're actually seeing them at, and then shrinking it down. Third, using large panels adds pacing to what I'm trying to say. I don't want people to just rush through my story, because then it's a bunch of words, and that really defeats the purpose of me telling people what I learned about myself from writing, which is that I want people to think about my ideas and make their own ideas from my ideas. Using large panels just seemed like a good idea, so I did it.

You've probably realized by now that the comic is called Addiction, especially because I just mentioned it, and it really isn't an addiction comic unless I use drug references. The most obvious is the visual comparison of the pencil, my writing utensil of choice, to a cigarette, which, as you know, is an addictive substance. It's not subtle at all, especially because I consistently draw myself holding the pencil like a cigarette and the "smoke" that comes out of the pencil is integral to the visual story I'm telling. But besides that really big drug comparison, I also want to draw attention to another, more subtle one that I'm actually quite proud of, which is on page 5. Go look at that page again, if you will. I'll even put a link right here. If you look closely, you'll notice that I'm holding the pencil like I would hold a syringe, and it's pointed right into the red road thing with prongs coming out. That red road thing is a vein. It's red and it has capillaries. It's a two-in-one reference to heroin and the fact that this writing stuff is really, really important to me.

You'll also notice that one of the other important stylistic choices I made was to use color, and I used my color in a very stylistic way. I feel that this is important to bring up, because I really dislike coloring, and it takes up a lot of time, but I thought that this symbolism was important enough to justify the extra time it's going to take to actually add that color in. I draw a lot of attention to my usage of color in this piece, especially because approximately half of the comic isn't colored at all. Obviously, that's on purpose, and no, I suppose it isn't a coincidence that it takes less time and is a lot less of a pain to leave half of the comic uncolored.

Besides how much time it saves me, the color is a symbol of ideas and things related to creation. The pencil and everything that comes out of the pencil is colored because that's stuff that I'm creating. When you see me through the smoke, you see that I'm colored too, because I often see myself in my own stories. I like to imagine that when I put myself into the context of my stories, I, for some time, become part of the world it takes place in. Conversely, when I'm immersed in my worlds, I'm not colored in, because I know that I'm not actually part of the world that I'm creating. I usually know very little about the worlds that I create when I write, which is why I'm constantly adding to them. There are some shots of me literally exploring my own worlds, examples on pages 3, 8, and 14-15 (speaking of which, backgrounds are the worst things to draw in my opinion, which is why I usually don't), and you can see that I'm standing out like a sore thumb. That's because I'm not native to these things I create. I'm an explorer just like everyone else. While I'm on the subject of color, I should mention that on the last page, I finally color myself without having to be obscured by smoke, because I'm putting myself with a lot of my characters and creations as a creator. You'll also notice that that's the first time that I'm not holding my pencil. That's intentional.

I suppose I need to talk a bit about the art style. Well, despite what it looks like, I don't actually enjoy drawing hands. I just do a lot of close-ups of hands because 1), I can draw those reasonably well, and 2), the fact that they're manipulating objects is oftentimes more important than who exactly is manipulating the objects, or you can tell who it is through the magic of context. For the actual style, when I was drawing my characters, I tried to reflect my art style from that point in my life, which isn't something that most people will appreciate, but what you can appreciate is the fact that my characters are getting more visually complex as the story moves through time towards the present. I think that's a good metaphor for how I wrote my characters, because I like to think that my characters developed more character arcs over time and that people may actually enjoy reading about them, just like they're actually something to look at now, as opposed to being stick figures with bad proportions and swords.

If you want to talk about character design, there isn't a lot to say, because it's mostly just me. It's me in my white jacket if it's a part of my story at the time I'm telling the story, or it's me in my pink jacket if it's a part of the story from my past. The explanation for that dichotomy is that I used to wear a pink jacket, not a white one, and I'm using that to visually show the difference between present me and past me. I have a ponytail and glasses, because that's what I've looked like for the last six or seven years of my life.

Let's talk about lines. I know that lines are important. That's why I'm spending several hours tracing over my sketches so my lines are clean and smooth and suitable for color. Again, there's not a whole lot to talk about, because the whole lines business is largely a personal preference, except for a couple of instances when I'm talking about dreams I had. You'll notice that I don't have any lines at all for those scenes, because that's sort of how I picture dreams—blurry but with vivid colors and shapes. Besides that, though, I just used a brush size that didn't make me feel incredibly claustrophobic and still made for easy coloring. I did use slight variability when I was doing outlines for smoke, but besides that, there aren't too many incredibly noticeable changes with the lines. After all, I don't want people to like my comic for its line complexity; I want them to like my comic for its story.

As for what I actually decided to draw in my comic, you'll see that towards the end it's mostly me talking directly to the camera for a while, and that's not because I couldn't think of anything else to draw. It was because I wanted to draw attention to myself and the things that I was saying, as opposed to dividing people's attention between the words and the pictures. What I'm saying at that point is much more important than who's saying it, so the pictures are repetitive, with me making slightly different gestures and making callbacks to earlier parts of the comic. What I'm trying to do there is make people spend more of their attention spans on the words, not the pictures.

That's about everything I can think of for the form of my comic. I realize I could and probably should discuss my visual metaphors or use of reverse foreshadowing, whatever that's called, but the point of those is that they're open to interpretation and many of the meanings I create with those generally aren't ones that I made on purpose. Because of that, it would feel a bit cheap to talk about them because I'd be giving myself more credit than I deserve. Anyways, if you just wanted to read about the mechanics of the comic, you can stop now, because I'm going to talk about something I want to touch on, which is what my comic is about.

I've been writing for a while now, and I can't really say that I've actually finished anything, partially because I never plan things out well and partially because of losing the drive at some point through. I don't think that I ever completely figured out the plot of one of my stories before actually writing until two months ago, when I started a new story, Neutiquam Erro, which is incidentally a graphic novel. Part of the reason why I think that Addiction is an apt title is because what I eventually say that I'm addicted to isn't writing, but ideas, and that's my downfall as a writer.

I often get lost in creating the world without framing it in a way that people can actually experience it, which is a problem for a storyteller, because there's a setting but no story. For the story that I'm working on now, for example, I've spent days thinking about how the mechanics of magic could work, which is fine because that's an extremely integral detail to the plot, but then I did things like figure out currency exchange rates, foreign relations, maps, and obscure types of magic that I know for a fact will never show up in the story. That's often the problem with creating a world first—you want to show everyone everything, but that's simply impossible.

I often say that I write for myself, which is true, because I do. But the thing is, I can't just write for myself, because that doesn't give me satisfaction. I have to write for other people so they can give me the validation that my ideas are thought-provoking and my characters are like "real" people, excepting the magic bit. So I write for others to write for myself.

There's something that I once read on a webcomic called Surviving the World, and in this comic, Dante says, "If the underlying message of your work has never been misinterpreted, then you're probably not a writer". That's the goal that I'm reaching for with all this "making ideas real" business. I want to be able to make a story and world substantial enough and proliferous enough that there are enough facts and people to start arguments. That's my ultimate goal. I've never written straight-up evil people or goody-goody protagonists because I don't like black and write morality. I don’t want to write something that people breeze through, being able to guess every clichéd turn of plot. I want people to wonder what's happening, get invested in the characters, and be seriously wounded if and when I kill the protagonist. It's hard for me to write these stories and a lot of thinking goes into it, so I don't want it to be a cakewalk for the readers, either. They should have to do at least half of the thinking that I did in making the story. In my opinion, that's fair.

I doubt that I'm the only person who feels this way about writing. There are plenty of people who write after all, and I'm sure that there's at least one person who has the exact same approach to writing and attitude about killing off protagonists every so often that I do. I say this because I really don't think that Addiction is about me, but about writing in general. There are a lot of people who write, and I can't speak for how they come up with their stories, but the answer as to why they write and show people what they write largely boils down to, "I had an idea and I wanted to share it with other people". It's just a fact that the feeling of making something that was just in your head into something that exists is intoxicating.

The sharing part of writing is just as important as the actual writing because if you write something and keep it to yourself, then those ideas are only real to you, and that doesn't make you a visionary, that makes you a crazy person. So no, I shouldn't talk for others, but I really do believe that just about anyone who writes anything writes for others to write for him or her self, and it's a mark of a productive society that we're able to do so.

Bringing it back to my opening statement about how being addicted to ideas is my downfall as a writer, I realize that writing needs that influx of ideas, but with a certain amount of discipline that I'm not completely sure I have. The major problem is that I can't write fast enough to get all of my ideas out where I want them to be—with other people. That's my explanation for the inverse relationship between how much people talk about their books and how much they have actually written. People who suffer from the same addiction as me just want to get those ideas out there, and the book isn't the fastest way to do that. I admit that I will spout on for hours about my stories to any people I know are willing to be spouted at, and I'm not ashamed of it. Just as long as, at some point, I actually finish my story and get my closure, then I get everything I had hoped for. If I need those little hits of attention along the way, then fine, that works too.

Just to conclude, writing is just our way of making things that aren't real real. It's really a tribute to language that we're able to have fantastic ideas and drown ourselves in them, and that's what this comic is really all about: Writing as a way to drown yourself and others.