Ask Croix

"Omelas"

A short story which describes a contentious type of utopia, and has been the subject of a great deal of literary interpretation.

Rapidly depleting postable content.

A collection of RPG Croix's.

Roland.

I've spent so much of my life longing to get back to that point where I could sit down and just doodle Croix and Roland together every other day.

A collection of images I made while playing a DND campaign with my friends and partners, titled "Starbound".

Set in our shared nostalgia of the 90's, a horror tinged JRPG-inspired amalgam of our shared traumas, exposed to the searing light of our modern sensibilities.

I was invited to this campaign as a late addition, after one of the players had requested to borrow Croix for their backstory. Eventually they lured me in to secretly guest as my own fursona, a troubled magic addict running from the metaphysical dragon that drove him to self imposed exile. Convinced of his ruinous nature, he vows to protect the one and only person he cares about, his younger brother Frankie, by leaving when Frankie needed him most.

Croix Romano, like functionally any other character I've ever roleplayed, may as well be Coach McGuirk from Home Movies. A definitional loser, relentlessly self-sabotaging in the way where you expect that he will always be a fuck-up. Broken as he is though, he is exactly where he should be, serving the people he cares about most at any expense.

I could write for hours about Starbound.

Sugar is a rock, Madoska tells our fortunes, Magirock explosions and Jules' pet dragon, the hotel stay and the road trip, stomping around like Godzilla and the haunted Toys R Us run. A battle against a cosmic goose, the state faire, running from the cops, I could write a whole comic about Starbound and all the things we did.

But that was our journey and our story, and so it sleeps in our hearts forevermore.

Stress is the tension put on good things, and I am unfortunately inundated with good things. Or anxiety. Maybe I conflate the two feelings.

I have a home. Time and forces outside of my control will invariably take it away. I have friends. A lot of them died this year, and a lot of them are suffering mentally and physically. I have comforts. I will not for long.

Everyone experiences this, to varying degrees, based on what things they care most about.

There are billions of configurations in which a string can be knotted. There's only a few configurations by comparison in which a string is unknotted. The difference between the chasm of knotted configurations and the unknotted configurations is intervention.

I can unknot a string. I can spool a string. I can keep it somewhere in which no activity interferes with the string. And whenever I need to use it or unspool it, I can take delicate care not to cross it with itself, wrap it around anything.

That's what stress is, I think. The tension involved in keeping the good, good.

I have a home. One day I might not, but if I act now, I can build connections. I can clean and repair. I have friends. I can be their ear, I can lend them my emotional strength and I can occupy their time with reasons to keep fighting. I have comforts. I can do commission work, I can explore new foods, I can find new ways of expressing myself and complete my projects.

And the constant tension placed on all of those things, the constant need for intervention and activity, the constant variable which separates those things from being broken, knotted and unusable is me.

"Escape"

A collection of storyboard first drafts for Rat Basketball.

I had plans for a while to try to make at least a first issue, which needed to do a lot of things at once. Establish the primary characters, but not too many. Establish the primary tension, but focus on the world building. Create an event and have it set the rest in motion.

A collection of Concept Images for "Rat Basketball". Initially imagined as a game, then a comic, and then more or less abandoned, Rat Basketball is a story about... Rats, and Basketball. In this world, Law is Basketball, and a ruling class of Prosecutors alone wield the right to litigate reality.

The story is about a people who cannot coexist with a fascist system, and the coalition they form in order to challenge the state and status quo.

It's a story that our kind have told thousands of times, and will tell a thousand times more, and will tell a thousand times more, and will tell a thousand times more. So needless to say, I felt like I didn't really have anything to add.