This series of comics is related to, but distinct from, Shapes of Things, which I still plan to resume in animated form in the future, but will remain just a fifty-episode canon of webcomics. It began life as a smaller, less ambitious project, one which I embarked upon mainly to keep my sentimental side happy in the early months of quarantine, which automatically canceled karaoke -which we see Lolly experiencing a night of here- as an acceptable pastime. I originally thought these early pages, published on Instagram throughout last summer, would come to a neat conclusion as soon as Lolly’s stage presence started to give way to, well….stage absence, (Open bar! W00T!!) But it rapidly became apparent to me that some of what I already know about Lolly Swath and Rosa Tiko’s pasts and inner lives -the proverbial iceberg of worldbuilding that I only publish the tip of, if you’ll….excuse the choice of wording that I only just realized sounds REALLY messed-up (wow, oops)- needed to be talked about sooner rather than later.
When you’re an artist, I believe, part of your job is to know things before you decide them. My characters are the way they are because of what my intuition tells me about them. When I’m writing, any kind of extraneous irritation that gets inside my head can make the difficult, complicated things that I know to be true about my characters a lot harder to articulate in a way that is satisfactory to me. A lot of last year was taken up by me erratically starting and stopping a whole bunch of different comics I didn’t quite commit to while I simultaneously underwent the process of moving to a new place during a goddamn lockdown. (Fortunately, some of these unfinished pieces ain’t half bad regardless, and could still result in something I’m proud enough of to publish in the future! So not a total loss, in other words…)
Being that Lolly in particular is like a kind of neurotic, vulnerable, overstimulated queer mirror I hold up to the state of the world, her childhood has steadily gotten more troubled and bittersweet the longer I’ve looked at it. There’s a part of me that would love to believe she’s been treated properly by everyone who was ever supposed to be looking after her, but the truth is, she has been through a few forms of abuse in her life. Sure, she’s also been lucky in some ways, things could have been worse, etc, etc….there has still been a lot of pain.
I thank you all in advance (and I hope I’m right) for sticking with this series while it…takes a coupla turns that feel a little bit darker than what you might expect from a Shapes of Things episode. If only because some of it is a little less focused on being funny in a way that I think feels a bit unfamiliar, coming from me.
Oh, and one last thing – I realize that making a comic about somebody singing is….inevitably kind of limited in its power to convey its subject. So, let me just reassure you that SHE IS THE FUCKING BOMB. LIKE, THIS CHICK SINGS HER TIIIITS OFFFFF. GOOSEBUMPS. SERIOUSLY.
Okay, here we go….