So we’re finally at the last page of the whole little Morbid Obsession thing I wanted to do as kind of a prelude to the main storyline that’s coming up. It was a pretty simple idea, I wanted to compare the anxiety over the short life of a fly to the way I feel when I worry about wasting the time life has given me, and I liked the idea of rhyming the circle of the fly’s life cycle to the circle of a clock, and here it is. It’s meant to provide some context as to the rabbit’s personality when people read this storyline, and set up some of the themes I want the stories to be about, but I started to kind of obsess on this and what’s to come afterwards, and I found it much easier to write page after page of things that will follow this rather than finish this little framing device, because I wanted it to be right for what a lot of this work is going to be about.
Also, that teacher might have be partially right with her ADD diagnosis, when I’m about to complete something that’s always when my brain signals me that it’s time to start something else. I think, look, shiny!
The idea for the whole fly thing came to me late last year when I was dating another guy, when he shows up in the comics he’s gonna be called the Boy from Fremont, due to him being from Fremont. I was dating him last fall, and he’d come into the city and sleep over, since he took Bart here, and Bart back to Fremont stops kind of early. I’m on my crazy artist sleeping schedule, though, so he’d fall asleep around one or two-ish, and I wouldn’t be tired yet. So, I was lying awake in bed next to him one night, I had recently had my book published, and I was thinking of the themes that I wanted to connect the next set of comics I wanted to do, and for some reason I had the memory of seeing that fly trapped behind glass when I was little, and it seemed right.
The comics I’m writing about the Boy from Fremont will precede the end of the stuff I’m calling Damaged Goods, because how things turned out with him led to me jumping into my next relationship, and that’s the one with the guy I broke up with a couple months ago and was posting drawings and things of, the one that I was writing into the Damaged Goods storyline, and leaving the ending of the storyline up to the state of the relationship at the time I finished writing. So, I kind of like the symmetry of the relationship stories toward the end of the book being the events that inspired what I wrote as a prelude for the book, if that makes any sense.
That’s my roundabout way of explaining and, I realize, not really explaining at all, why this whole Morbid Obsession bit took me so long to finish, as it was kind of hinging on things in those relationships, even though I’ve more or less had it written for months. The first chapter, people might remember, is called The Children of Marx and Lady Gaga, which is a reference to the Godard film Masculin Feminin, and the themes of 60′s French New wave films are kind of important to what I’ve been writing, so next up I’m going to post some drawings and random bits I’m doing related to that, maybe another Douchebags of Comics card or two, and then we’re finally past the prelude and on to the storyline proper, which will start with a strip about Rickets and Prester, right after we last saw them, when Prester comes home from the Dove of Love concert he was headed out to see.
