FEND started with this drawing.
My memory of the last few years is extremely foggy, despite so much happening. In order to write this post, I had to go through my emails, google a bunch of dates, ask my wife a lot of questions, in order to piece things together. It seems like this fogginess is pretty common for people going through a traumatic event - the brain does you a solid and makes it harder to hang on to the painful specifics. I wish that I kept a diary of some sort, I guess my Instagram account counts as one - but anything that happened outside of there is a bowl of sad mush. According to my emails I was in contact with doctors, lawyers, aunts, uncles, and many of my mothers friends - also there are many emails from my poor mom. Some I answered, some I didn’t. I’m glad that I don’t remember, but also sad that I don’t either. This is a dialectical thought. Two opposing ideas existing in the same place. Both completely opposite, but both completely true.
In 2021 after finishing my first comic with my spirit guide Aubrey Sitterson, I made the drawing above. I don’t recall what I was thinking about when I made it, but this is where the idea for FEND began. I was in a period of my art making where I was spending a lot of time making fake comic pages - that is art that looked like it was one page of a whole story, but there is no story, there are no other pages - I was workshopping my drawing style, trying to transform it into a viable storytelling machine. My style is very busy, noisy, detailed, lots of zapping and twinkling. In order to tell a comic story, you need to communicate with the reader visually - and when there is a lot of “noise”, the story can get lost in that noise, and that can result in beautiful comics that cannot effectively communicate a story. Which I’m sorry - clear communication is the whole point of comics to me. Some comics don’t need to do quite exactly that, but for the ones I wanted to make my main personal requirement was to keep it as uncluttered as I could. Pretty hard to pull off when your brain is a mess. I did my best.
Character Design
The figure in the background of the drawing above, later named Arkin, was wearing a wide-brimmed Stetson hat because I was watching a lot of westerns. Specifically the Italian made so-called “spaghetti westerns” of the 1960s. Filmed with wide anamorphic lenses - big beautiful films made in Europe (mostly southern Italy and Spain). Their backgrounds contained the rolling, dusty hills that looked just enough like the American Southwest to make it work for half the price. I used that aesthetic of big skies, voluminous clouds, distant hills, and orange dusty terrain to help clarify the action. I set my busy, complicatedly rendered characters on a simple palette of three colors. Problem one: solved.
The old man character Tober Helm was next. A big fella, heavy armor, long Gandalf beard - tough and world weary but with kind eyes. I love this kind of guy. I had already drawn many versions of tough old robot wizard SOB’s, but now with Arkin materializing I knew I started making hundreds of preparatory drawings and If you look in the back of FEND I added some there. A big fella that wouldn’t ever start a fight, but had the steel to end one - should it come to that. I spent several months getting him in to shape.
This was happening during peak Covid, and peak work stress. I was very lucky to still have my day job - many lost theirs, I don’t want to seem callous about that issue. The upside was I still had an income and insurance (that I never used), the downside was through all of the terrible news, and death tolls, grinding anxiety, I still had to deliver at work. I don’t remember doing any of that either but holy shit it was so busy and crazy. Thank God those got memory-holed. Even after nervously researching all day, I still had so much energy to burn off.
The Story
As I look through my story notebooks, I really did try to plan this thing out at first. I thumbnailed the pages extensively (see below). But I just couldn’t get my brain to materialize a complete story. The specifics failed me - I read many “how-to” comics manuals, watched interviews with comic makers, read a zillion comics and mostly came out with more questions to be answered! I had an absolute mountain of anxious energy to blow on this thing, but with no clear path forward I was beginning to stall, and stalling at that time was really going to be hard to deal with.
I can’t recall how I landed on a way to move forward - honestly I’m pretty sure that I didn’t land anywhere, I got antsy and impulsively started the story. I didn’t have a plot, or even an antagonist - I think I told myself that If something didn’t work I would just start the page over and try something else - a story might materialize out of the middle part of my brain as I worked panel to panel. I had already made two unfinished attempts at comics in this way (see the stories ROAM F/X and VEER elsewhere on this site). But now I realized that I should just make my proper comic that way. I had an idea of the first few pages but after that, I was just going to see what happened myself. And that became the fun part of this book. I was very curious to see what would happen to these two guys out in the desert!
My daily schedule was to get up at 8AM, work my day job nine or ten hours, then spend another six hours lying on our sofa working on FEND, after that it was three or four double vodka sodas and pass out in bed. Vodka is not an antidepressant. It is the opposite of that, baby. It only makes things worse, it only makes things harder. If you’re using alcohol as an antidepressant, you’re not going to like what happens to your life with that kind of treatment routine. You’ll find things get out of control quite quickly. I got really lucky and had a health event that knocked me off that course. If I hadn’t, I don’t know where I’d be - actually, I kind of do know.
I spent ten months making the main story of FEND completely. A fully colored 40 page comic. No digital coloring, only minor digital placement of some items - but it’s all on the page. If you look at them in real life, they are exactly what got printed. I am really proud of that. My drawing tools (alcohol markers, Japanese art pens, water-based paint pens) are all quick-drying and that has always been a feature of my art. I work really fast and if some bad drawing happens, I would correct the whole page with paint markers and most of the time never had to re-draw any pages. I don’t have of these bad pages extant in my files, so I’m pretty sure there aren’t any. I would just fix things as I went. All a blur.
FEND Gets Published
Not to condense things too much, but that is pretty much the story of making FEND from what I can recall. The company that prints and sells my merch Deathwish Inc. has a small book publishing arm and when I presented them the idea of this book they jumped on it. I scanned it up and presented it to them, they did the rest. Absolutely beyond lucky that I got hooked up with them! I owe Jacob Bannon and everyone at Deathwish a lot for helping me make this thing a reality.
There was a long period after FEND was finished and off with the publisher. It’s painful to admit, but even despite doing this big thing I didn’t feel any relief, or pride, or anything. I was unable to feel either of those emotions, or any emotions aside from sadness or anger. Even as I got updates about the book - it was done being prepped for printing, then it went to the printer, and finally it came back. When I received my personal copies in the mail, I still didn’t feel anything. When it got reviewed in The Comics Journal (a pretty good review as far as TCJ goes) I didn’t feel anything, when people started buying it and telling me they liked it, I’m so sorry to say I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t muster anything beyond a general awareness that I had completed something.
I was so sad and tired, but also ambitious and wired. Another dialectic. I immediately started another comic. One that I never finished called KA! about a giant killer bird (see below).
KA! made it about 30 pages in before it stalled out, and it’s still up on my shelf staring at me. I would like to finish it someday, but for some reason then - it didn’t click. it was early 2022.
With no new project to focus on, I sank further into depression for that early part of the year and it lasted a long time. That March I doodled a little drawing of a spaceman and a dog in a big fishbowl helmet. After a year of violent, action-filled art, I found that I enjoyed the cuteness of this little character. It was easy to draw and despite it’s simple nature I could put a lot of emotion into it. This little drawing became simple little three or four page comic that I posted on my IG - it started very cute and no-frills, but it’s me of after all, so it pretty quickly got dark. Another glimpse into the middle of my brain. I’m telling you guys, I was losing my shit really badly by this point. Enter Carrier Bag.
To be continued.