Muses, high school memories and one trick ponies

A long time ago (aproximately four years ago), I drew a comic book for Prom. Kim, when seeing it, remarked, "What a Ted thing to do. He just draws everything."

This is, undoubtedly why I was voted "Most likely to draw his marriage proposal" in my senior biology class.

Either way, I have been desperately brainstorming for ideas so that I can start drawing for the upcoming deadline for the Rising Stars of Manga contest hosted by TokyoPop every year. While I have often called TokyoPop the brothel of the manga world, I've decided that every art prostitute has to start somewhere, even if it's lowly and seedy TokyoPop.

None of the ideas seemed to mesh. I have two great storylines, but one is more appropriate as a daily comic strip that appears in the newspaper, like Frazz, Calvin and Hobbes or Peanuts. The other would make a great manga, but at the moment, the story fills in at about seven different sections, which I affectionately call "books" (since each one could easily fill up at 120 page manga volume). None of them could be distilled into the short story equivilent of 15-20 pages. I was in a pickle.

But late night inspiration will do wonders to a starving artist, and I came upon the idea just now. If drawing is my one trick pony, as Kim commented in high school, then why not reuse the basic idea that I had in Prom? A few scribbles, notes and snippets of crude dialogue later, I had the basic pinnings of a short story in graphic novel form. A rather clever one at that (I felt).

The writing process is incredibly organic. Format is key to everything - and short stories have never been my forte. But when you get an idea, it latches onto your brain like some kind of mind sucking octopus and will never let go. And the thing is, you don't want it to let go - at least, until you've transfered all the valuable information it is transmitting pyschically into your mind onto a scrap of paper that you will carry around and protect and revise and scratch out and draw over for the next week or so.

There is no science to this thing. Sometimes you're full of ideas, and sometimes you're a dry well. Luckily, after some digging, I've managed to find some water for this dry well of mine that I affectionately call my imagination.

Those who are familiar with my high school exploits will know immediately what I'm talking about. The rest are just gonna have to wait until the rough draft has been sketched out.