So last year I talked quite a bit about this idea that was eating my brain for a new comic, a steampunk adventure thing that I was very excited about, and I even put together some pages and development art for it.
And then I sorta stopped talking about it.
And then the projected launch date wandered on by and shrugged when nothing happened.
I have had a few questions about it since then, so I figure I should go ahead and explain what happened for those who are interested. Long story short: it got mired in development heck. “Writer’s block” isn’t exactly an accurate description, but it does sorta apply.
Essentially, no matter how hard I tried, all of the ideas I came up with were turning the idea into something I didn’t want it to be. I have this problem occasionally: whenever I try to write songs, for instance, they always come out as country/western, and I hate country/western music. So the net result is I never write songs. In the case of Arclight Adventures, what I had intended to be a fun and over-the-top adventure comic kept turning into a grim and violent drama about the moreaus (who were supposed to only have the occasional subplot, not steal the show). Instead of Mission: Impossible [1] in Victorian garb, I was getting a treatise on man’s inhumanity to man.
I wasn’t happy with how the characters were developing, either. Fagin (the fox moreau) came out nicely, but I never was comfortable with John Dunn, and as things were developing, the character of Charlie was becoming less and less a character of her own but instead being defined by who her father was. In short, I was falling into the same old racefail/genderfail traps, but every time I tried to steer away from them, they just kept popping back up.
Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped working on it, hoping that some time away would let me come back to it with a fresh perspective. So far, well, it hasn’t happened yet — but I’m hoping that the upcoming Dragon*Con will help. I fear that the only way to fix it will require a major tossing-and-redeveloping of the main cast, which is a painful process. At the end of the day, I may be better off to just do a different project all together, instead.
-The Gneech
[1] The cool and awesome original Mission: Impossible, not those crappy Tom Cruise movies.
Well, that explains that… I’d been wondering what’d happened to it all. It sounded like such a neat premise and I was looking forward to you doing it. I’d rather you be happy w/the results than trying to jam things through (though it sounds like the one you didn’t want would’ve been pretty cool if executed right…but then, that’s me… ;-D)
Take your time, Gneech. I’d rather you gave us your very best- there’s a reason why I’m one of your fans (Both Suburban Jungle and NeverNever…) and that would be it.
[…] combined with the gear-grinding on Arclight Adventures, has led me to reflect on just what it is I want to accomplish with my creative endeavors, why it […]