I’ve been reading the A Girl and her Fed webcomic the past week or so, which has the usual effect of making me want to do a little webcomic of my own.
It in particular, though, has made me vaguely think perhaps I’m not, IDK, weird enough to pull off what I want to do. Like, ok. Girl. Fed. Cyborg conspiracies. Gotcha. I could probably get that far on my own.
Ghost of Benjamin Franklin? Look, I’m sorry, I wouldn’ta thought of that.
Hyper-sapient koala? NOPE. ‘Fraid not. Checking out of Weirdsville here, creatively speaking.
But it did make me go “huh” in terms of creation of a webcomic. Sort of a moment of clarity of the “it’s alligators all the way down” kind of clarity, where I could suddenly see the pile-up of absurdities that drive a story.
‘Girl, Fed, cyborg conspiracies’ is the sort of…real-world, if you’ll forgive me for real-worlding cyborgs, structure, but the ghosts and the koala are what drives it into interesting, long-term crazypants story, I think. And I feel like that’s kind of what I’m missing, are the alligators all the way down aspect for any given webcomicy project.
I have the couple kinda cute little pages I did for a whatever thing, the whole idea being very coffee-shop-AU-based, you know, Questionable Content But Not, and QC starts out with, well. Marty and Pint-sized, so we’ve got Humans and AIs from the start. I’m not sure, strictly speaking, that I think it’s maybe not quite such an Alligators All The Way Down premise as AGahF, but I’m just thinking aloud here anyway, spitballing. It’s (literally) Coffee Shop, Hero, AI, although as it develops it gets really strongly into Queer, too, so maybe that’s one of its alligators.
Not enough alligators. That’s it. That’s what I think. I don’t have enough alligators. (I mean, Digger, Digger was ‘what if a wombat dug a hole to another dimension/world/place’ and then it was nothing BUT alligators, but that’s Ursula, and I’m not, tragically, Ursula…)
Why am I obsessed with this? IDK. Because I am. I just gotta find my alligators…