Media, Society, Monsters, and Magic
This comic is about how trauma isn’t just something that someone “overcomes” on the road to personal character development, but rather a significantly transformative experience with lingering aftereffects.
This comic is also about how significantly my art style has changed during the year after I left a traumatic workplace environment. It was an extremely difficult transition, but it’s important to create room to grow.
The Demon King has ten chapters, and I’m a little more than halfway done with the first round of edits. I should be able to meet my projection of finishing by March 15, a month after I completed the first draft. The draft is only about 30k words, but progress is slow. The psychic damage I’m taking from finding typos and inconsistencies and unintended repetitions cannot be exaggerated.
This is only the first of five story arcs, so one of my main goals during this round of editing is to ensure that the central conflict is presented clearly and makes sense according to the somewhat limited information available to the reader. This is a short summary:
A powerful wizard named Balthazar wants to find a magical artifact hidden somewhere in the mountains between the kingdom of Whitespire and the ocean, which is highly poisonous. This artifact probably has something to do with the pure water coming down from the mountains and ensuring the prosperity of the kingdom. Balthazar doesn’t mention this artifact to his confidant Ceres, the reigning princess of Whitespire, who is presumably either unaware of its existence or unwilling to discuss it. If Balthazar does manage to find this artifact, the way he plans to use it will result in the downfall of Whitespire.
Balthazar is open with Ceres about his intentions to destroy Whitespire, but he makes no move to attack the kingdom, choosing instead to seek other magical artifacts elsewhere. It’s unclear why Balthazar is taking such a circuitous route toward his goal, but I hope the reader is able to get the sense that he’s not really the sort of person who would harm anyone if he could avoid it. He specifically doesn’t want to harm Ceres, mainly because he likes her.
There’s no significant antagonist in the story aside from Balthazar himself, as he’s going to have to do terrible things and hurt the people he cares about if he insists on achieving his goal. Unfortunately, he’s deadly serious about what he aims to do, so much so that it’s at the core of his sense of identity.
It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I’m inspired by the narrative structure of Homestuck, in which everything seems very silly and trope-driven until the reader gains a better understanding of what’s going on with the world of the story. I think it’s probably a fool’s errand to ask any given writer what themes they’re trying to express, but Balthazar has a line to the effect of “you always have a choice” that’s probably the closest thing to a statement of purpose I have regarding issues of individual freedom and dignity in the face of overwhelmingly horrible circumstances.
Also there are dick jokes, which symbolizes the fact that I like dick jokes.
In any case, once I finish this round of edits, I’m going to let the story sit for another month before writing a formal query. I’ll then do another round of edits before participating in several pitch events starting in late May. I’ll more than likely take the story offline at that point, but you can still read the draft as I edit it on AO3 (here).
We live in a society.
Trying to apply real world logic to video games is a fool’s errand, but I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that most of what “heroes” do is awfully close to war crimes.
…I write, having just spent two hours leveling up my JRPG adventuring party through wanton murder and environmental destruction.
It is a beautiful day, and you are a horrible demon king.
What would you like to do?
– Make a pot of tea.
– Water your plants.
– Read a trashy romance novel.
– Have a nice chat with your nemesis.
– Take a long nap.
This illustration is by the magical Starstray (on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr). The prompt I gave her was “a very powerful and very fancy wizard who is very bad at being a demon king.”
I commissioned this painting to celebrate having finished the first book of The Demon King, which I’m going to call The Temple of Everlasting Autumn. It took me four months to write this 30k-word novella, and I’m going to take another month to edit it. I’d also like to put together some book cover style graphics to showcase each of the ten chapters. After that, it will probably be time to start thinking about where the project can go in the future. In the meantime, you can read the first draft (as I gradually edit it) and check out all the comics and illustrations on AO3 (here).
Happy Lunar New Year! And best wishes for a strong a gentle new year.
I submitted this illustration to the Goodbye 2020/Hello 2021 collaborative zine put together by the organizers of the DC Zinefest. I loved their 2020 collabzines about Halloween and COVID-19, so I jumped at the chance to participate in this one. I wanted to draw something much angrier and more political, but I ended up settling on the theme of “support and recovery.” I’m probably more furious at this particular moment than I have ever been in my life, but I also feel like I have a duty to be kind and not post upsetting things on social media while everyone is stuck inside, trapped in Zoom meetings and “essential” jobs, and dealing with poverty, eviction, and life-threatening illness. I’ve got a lot of material saved up, though, so once we get this vaccine I am going to go wild.
You can follow DC Zinefest (on Twitter) and (on Instagram), and you can download free full-color and printable copies of all the collabzines they’ve organized from their website (here).
I’m about as “indie” as someone can be, but I’ve had trouble finding a place in various indie creative communities during the past year. This is partially because I can’t meet or talk with anyone face to face, but I think it might also be because the sort of work I do isn’t considered to be political. I’m not punk enough, basically.
I don’t see my work as apolitical, though. For example, the full title of this illustration is:
“In higher education, you can’t ask for help because people will think you’re damaged, and you won’t receive help because no one wants to waste resources on the sort of person who has to ask for help. I tried to change the system from the inside by becoming a professor and being kind and supportive to my students and colleagues, and I was remarkably successful. In the end, however, I’m still the sort of person who needs to ask for help every once in a while, so I was denied tenure. The ideology of neoliberal capitalism has all but destroyed the values of higher education, and the pandemic has only exacerbated the damage. Because the problem is systemic, there’s very little any one individual can do, so here, have some plants. They represent diversity, but only in a superficial and visually pleasing way.”
This botanical study was inspired by the point-and-click game When the Past Was Around, which tells a story about burning out and rediscovering joy. Through its gameplay and visual design, the game encourages the player to nurture a more forgiving worldview and advocates for adjusting your goals to reflect your passions instead of your limitations. It’s a short game, but it really spoke to me.
A lot of people are very angry right now, and I understand that. I’m angry too, but I express it in my own way. To me, the opposite of neoliberalism isn’t “productive” anger, but rather “laziness” and an embrace of the sort of gentleness and beauty that exists for its own sake. I like video games precisely because they’re a “waste” of time. I like fan art because it’s “worthless” in creative economies, and I like plants because they exist in their own “imperfect” and “limited” ways without requiring “work” or “effort.”
In any case, aggressively ignoring the bourgeois dichotomy between high art and pop art feels very punk to me.
I just posted Chapter Nine of The Demon King on AO3 (here).
This is the second-to-last chapter of the novella, and it’s meant to function as a narrative climax. At the beginning of the first chapter, Balthazar casually murders someone; and, at the end of this chapter, he destroys an entire ecosystem. He has his reasons for doing what he’s doing, but I want to make it clear to the reader that he’s not fucking around. I also want to make it clear that this story is not YA fiction, so the language I used in this chapter is a bit… tumescent, let’s say.
Even though its narrative arc is complete in itself, this novella is intended to be the first part of a longer story, and I hope this sort of explosive conclusion is equally satisfying and intriguing. I think it can be understood as a natural outgrowth of the concepts that have already been introduced, but my goal is for an astute reader to come out of this chapter with a deeper curiosity about the history and metaphysics of this world.
This illustration of Balthazar is by the brilliant Jennifer So (@hellojennso on Twitter, @jennosaur on Instagram, and @jennlso on Tumblr), who designed the character. This is actually the first character design created for The Demon King (back in November 2018), and I’m excited to finally share it. Jenn nailed the character on the very first draft, and this is how I’ve pictured him since then.
I’ve been thinking about graphic design a lot recently, especially as a tool to help writers promote their work. Contemporary mainstream social media is extremely image-oriented, which puts writers at a disadvantage. I therefore think it’s worthwhile to figure out how to create graphic images that focus on text but are still visually striking and easily shared.
Since book covers serve the same purpose, I decided to launch this project by thinking about how certain compositions are used to convey specific moods, and I’ve been drawing quick studies along the way. Silja Götz’s online class Book Cover Illustration has been an incredible resource!
It probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that I love horror novel covers. “Modern gothic” is one of my favorite genres, and I could sketch these types of covers all day (and night).
A true story from These Trying Times™
The song my husband is singing is (this one) from Azumanga Daioh.
“I would have just moved to another apartment,” someone commented when I posted this on Instagram. And I totally agree, but at the same time, moving during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t easy, and I don’t want to do it again. My illustrated piece of flash fiction “Apartment Hunting” (here) is actually about how strange and unpleasant this experience was. It’s been difficult to try to navigate my professional life without a stable internet connection, but at least I have a large library of anime to help me make it through.
This illustration of Ceres is by Sali (@salisillustrations on Instagram and @saliechelon255 on Tumblr), who creates beautiful digital paintings based on books and anime, including Studio Ghibli movies and the Harry Potter novels, alongside her original work. Her characters are fashionable and expressive, and they always fit perfectly into their richly detailed environments. Sali has a talent for drawing fancy wizards, and it was a pleasure to be able to work with her on this illustration for The Demon King.
The eighth chapter of The Demon King is the culmination of Ceres’s first character arc. It echoes her introduction, in which she glibly treats murder as the only viable option to a tricky political problem, but now the reader is able to see the deliberation that leads to her decisions.
I’m interested in female political leadership, especially at high levels, when an executive’s position is just as symbolic as it is practical. It’s my impression that, whether it’s Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris or Tsai Ing-wen or Angela Merkel, there’s an expectation that a woman needs to be perfectly competent and capable while still being both “rational” and having all the charm and charisma of a male politician. This is impossible in real life, of course, but it’s fun to exaggerate these pressures and expectations in fiction to see where they lead.
In any case, the prompt I gave the artist was “a beautiful fairytale princess quietly plotting murder.”
Although it’s still rough around the edges, I’m posting the first draft of The Demon King on AO3, and you can find it (here).
Digital Fantasy Diary 