Episode 50 is in progress right now, and it’s an unruly little monster as usual. I tend to pick dates that have some kind of meaning, now that they’re big enough to be semi-annual events. So let’s go with….April 20th. Because, you know….weeed, duuuude. Yoooo….
*ahem* To help pass the time, here are some questions from people who have been following Shapes of Things over the last five years. There may be more to come in the future…..
Q: How and why did Shapes of Things take shape?
A: It was my way of venting a general sense of frustration and hopelessness and fury that seemed to be ready to blow me clean apart if I didn’t start channeling it into something. I was trying to sharpen my chops as a satirical cartoonist and writer at the peak of what the media dubbed “Crackgate” – a dismal, pathetic political fiasco that put my hometown of Toronto “on the map” in the least desirable way possible. I felt like I had started to finally piece together a coherent picture of my own future just in time for the whole world to show me, in spectacular, almost downright theatrical fashion, how “too little, too late” everything about me was. Whatever my special strength was going to be -Competence? Earnestness? Rage?- it couldn’t possibly be any match for what the world of 2014 was willing to slow down to look at.
So I did the only logical thing I could do – I got really, really high and went fucking insane. I think it worked!
Q: Dream states of Unjar and Lolly were an early theme – what influenced that creative decision?
A: Dream or fugue states are a classic forum for cartoon madness, from”Swing You Sinners” to Dumbo’s “Pink Elephants On Parade” to Bob Clampett’s The Great Piggy Bank Robbery to Bart & Lisa Simpson’s skirmishes with a shape-shifting nightmare version of Groundskeeper Willie, etc. I was actually concerned at one point that, while I found this kind of open, surrealistic playground appealing, I’d be selling myself short as a writer by sticking with such a well-trodden idea, despite having some personal reasons to explore it as well – My early childhood dreams were often incandescent visions of pure terror, self-insert phobia blitzkriegs that left me completely shaken and unable to function, sometimes for a week afterwards.
In or around 2012, I started having really vivid recollections of my dreams again, only this time the details of them usually seemed hilarious, not truly distressing to me, within hours of waking up. By sheer coincidence, a short time later, the already-incredible animated series Gravity Falls aired the episode entitled “Dreamscapers”, which gave the “living purely in your own or someone else’s imagination/dream/nightmare” genre of cartoons a new lease on life so spectacular that, in my point of view, it basically pointed the way forward for cartoons in general. From there, I started to get a much clearer idea of what my “hook” for the introductory episodes of Shapes of Things was going to be…
Q: Did you know what themes you wanted to explore from the very beginning, or did they reveal themselves as your relationship with your characters developed?
A: This is something I’ve debated the real answer to with myself for a long time. Ultimately, I think it’s about an even mix of both – I knew what I was anxious to try out before I even started, but I often wound up uncorking some stranger and sometimes scarier memories than I realized I had in the process. Before I created Unjar, I hadn’t sat down and quietly thought about what middle school and early high school was like for me in almost ten years. I was, as it turns out, still angrier about it than I even knew. Lolly, meanwhile, had a truly bizarre evolution – her basic blueprint started out carefree and cheerful and then suddenly got real dark, real fast. In a seemingly fateful turn of events, I witnessed a teenage girl get assaulted while I was drawing a model sheet of Lolly on my front porch on a warm summer night in 2014. After I made sure the girl was safe and she reassured me that she was prepared to keep walking home, I immediately flipped over the page in my sketchbook and posed out a scene involving Lolly automatically developing freaking strength and endurance as a reflex to bring down a guy who’s groping her. I never expected the dualities of what she is -soft and coarse, optimistic and enraged, conspicuously ladylike and the ultimate Trumpian “Nasty Woman”- to be pushed to such extremes until it became obvious to me that they needed to be.
Q: What or who were the inspirations for your characters? Are they based on real people or are they total fictions of your imagination?
A: Lolly and Unjar are basically the two halves of me you get from making a cross-section of my personality. Unjar is the angry, anxious young man who’s just beginning to wrap his head around how hostile and intense and just plain dumb the outside world can be, just like I was in grades 7-10. Lolly is the post-secondary outcast set adrift on a sea of her own regrets, traumas and flaws – so basically me right after college. Starla and Rafool and not strictly my parents, and part of the reason for this is that they’re a bit of a mystery -again with the Gravity Falls influence- so how much they overlap with my parents isn’t even entirely decided yet….
Q: Have you ever considered animating your work, and do you think that would enhance it, or would it lose something in translation?
A: Shapes of Things was always conceived with animation in mind. Originally, the idea of doing it as a webcomic was just a way of getting around my lack of experience with drawing, computers, animation, monetization and creating anything with “mass appeal”, whatever that is….but slowly I realized that independent comics seemed like the route to take as much because of what it demanded of me as the freedom it offered. Yes, it was kind of a way of keeping myself sheltered for a while – It’s hard to be judged by other people when they’ve never heard of you – But it also forced me to invent more. The lack of any specific expectations or restrictions regarding what exactly a webcomic needs to be and what it should deliver forced me to delve deeper into what could be done, to create a world worth building on. It feels perverse to admit it now, given how I had to seeeeriously get my initial anxiety and manic behaviour under control to get to where I’m able to keep doing this for years, but the truth is, at the early stages I kind of thrived on how much I resented the thought of being insignificant and average. I mean, to the point where even completely manic, feverish workaholism was preferable. I’ve toned my approach down since, but at one time it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I was trying to draw comics so fast that I would end up matching an animator’s workload without actually animating. I simply had to know if I could endure it. I’ve also since realized something else – Doing this only makes for a hopelessly misleading comparison, because animating feels completely different from making comics. In fact, I’ve done short pieces of animation that had dozens of drawings in them that were less work and stress than trying to condense the same moment/action/characterization into just one drawing that tells the whole story. It is sometimes astounding to me how much more difficult this can be. You have no actual movement to hide behind. You have to just…..convey it. In one drawing.
Q: Who was your inspiration for Rosa?
A: I’m gonna keep her specific identity to myself, but she was a woman I drew in the nude many times in college, who was also one of the few people on staff who actively contributed to making that working environment more hospitable, and for that I’m eternally grateful – as you can probably tell by the character’s attributes….
Q: How did going to arts high school affect your style and point of view?
A: Extremely profoundly. In fact, I would say that a pretty huge portion of what doing this comic is for is to get back to a creative and personal space that reflects the sense of adventure and purpose that I had about being an artist at that time, but to also fuse this together with the discipline and care that comes with experience. This can be surprisingly hard to do for me, because….well, let’s just say not all of my memories of my post-secondary art education are exactly what you’d call….”pleasant”….
Q: What are your greatest influences stylistically?
A: I have pored over Calvin and Hobbes in search of ever-more inspiration throughout my entire life. I think that’s right about where I started with studying other people’s work for the sake of creating my own, a habit I’ve never left behind. I’ve freeze-framed everything from Mickey’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice to Stimpy’s Invention, probably many more times than necessary. I believe in a higher power, and it’s name is Pink Floyd. Yadda yadda yadda, Zappa Velvets Bowie….something something good taste. Sounds about right. Next question?
Q: Have you found there to be any obstacles in your way?
A: Depression, anxiety, chair too comfortable, chair too uncomfortable, news too sad, air smells funny….and not much else, to be honest. I don’t really have to answer to anyone but myself, so opposition isn’t really an issue for me. I’m my own worst enemy at certain times, hesitating to do or say what I believe just because it wasn’t always well-received in the past. But where there’s a will there’s a way, and I’ve thrown away a surprisingly small amount of what I’ve written. I seem to have a pretty good idea of what I’m doing….