SOME INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THIS COMIC
- I've been wanting to draw something like this one for awhile, as the "preliminary exploration of its themes" here will attest. I definitely think a lot of artists, myself included, are driven by wanting to actualize a particular set of images that take up more space in their heads than other stuff. Not sure what it means that one of those images for me is "chick banging a rail off another chick's tits", but what are you gonna do.
- The asymmetrical layouts are inspired by Angie Wang's story in the recent SP7 anthology, which is one of the most visually exciting pieces of comics art I've seen all year.
- Panel three is me tryin' to riff on the "mad tea party" tableau from Alice in Wonderland.
- I ended up liking the color scheme on this one, even though it's like the exact opposite of my original plan. The girls were supposed to be really softly colored up against a violently bright red and blue color space when I first drew this all out, but the figures came out way more vibrant than I expected when I painted them in. I was looking for more of a queasy, sneakily disturbing vibe than a full on noise-comics assault on the senses anyway, so I ended up just using a watered-down version of the same color palette on the background to push the figures further up front. Of course, the final word on the success of these colors belongs to you...
- "What's a good name for a crazy LA cokehead chick?" I asked myself, before realizing that dropping "Serena" in there randomly would make this comic a piece of Gossip Girl fan fiction. You're welcome.
- The words captioning the panels is a continuation of something I was doing in my "Hipster Chix" comic. I remind myself of what the final product is supposed to be like as I'm working on drawing a page by writing notes directly on the board, and lately I've been enjoying the visual look of them sitting there next to the art, as well as the way they kinda provide a commentary on the work you're seeing. I also like to have something else verbal beside the dialogue going on in comics like this one, where the words are all pretty obvious. "G.P." is Gary Panter -- that panel is an homage to a similar foreshortened-hand shot from the maestro's Jimbo in Paradise that I'm currently unable to locate an online image of. Chris Ware also ripped it off in Lint.
- The dialogue is somewhat loosely adapted from an incredibly affecting anecdote in this article that I found myself thinking about months after I originally read the thing. It's sleazy right across the board with me, you guys.
- Finally, a reminder that all this stuff goes up first on my tumblr, along with a bunch of art that I don't post here. Get hip
