‘dying of thirst’ Secret Language
When I wrote ‘the Guest House’ in 2017, I experimented with using color to indicate different narrators to the reader:
For the follow-up ‘Dying of Thirst’, I used different color schemes for different narrators, and also to differentiate a character’s memories from the present tense of the story. I wanted to present a past version of a character as a totally separate person within the language of the narrative.
I should mention that I read a copy of David Mazzucchelli’s ‘Asterios Polyp’ when it came out and have dim recollections of how the color switches worked, but did not revisit it.
I had a stomach infection and a very high fever when I premiered this comic at SPX in September 2018, and because of that I had trouble articulating its complexities to people the way I usually do. I didn’t notice this until the next spring when I started tabling at shows again.
When I thought the characters were making good decisions, or their train of thought was not self-destructive, I used ‘Saga” corners to help guide the reader easily to the next panel. When they did I thought was contrary to their better natures, I pushed the reader off the page or away from the next panel:
In addition to Fiona Staples’ work on ‘Saga’, I was influenced by vinyl record cutouts. My understanding is that when record distributors sold to shops on consignment, one method of getting money back for unsold stock was to cut diagonally across a top corner of the sleeve, and then the record shop would return that corner only to the distributor instead of the whole record to show they hadn’t been sold. The record retail store was supposed to destroy the rest of the record, but the stores I liked would illegally sell the cutout record at a discount. Same idea: some panels in my comic are remainered items that someone was supposed to throw away but instead they exist in mutilated sleeves. The contents are fine, they’re the same, it’s just a superficial imperfection and signifier of class. Like the narrator character ‘Justin’, I was a middle class person at a middle- and high-schools that were predominantly very wealthy people.
This is complicated by the fact that some of the corner cutouts are purely compositionally elements to support a visual idea, like these:
There’s also one secret meaning to the corner cutouts that addresses multiple people in the narrative with the same name.
You can read a long preview of this comic here, or order a copy at drawdoer.bigcartel.com.
