Transyltown

Enchantment Passing Through was such a personal story, I was so worried about how it would be received. Thank you, by the way, to all of those that gave me positive feedback.  Towards the end of my journey as an animation major at the Art Institute of Houston, I was having doubts about my career path. The weight of thoughts such as “Is this really what I want to do”, and “I’m not really good at this anyway”, where weighing down on me. At some point I was approached by a homeless stranger who just wanted to talk, and said I looked like the type of person who would listen.

It was an interesting experience, he was wearing a Marvel Comics t-shirt, so we kind of broke the ice talking about dorky stuff like comics, Star Wars, and the book I was reading at the time, one of The Sword of Truth novels. Afterwards we both released the burdens weighing us down by talking about them. I won’t share his story, but essentially he was at the top of his game only to have everything he cared about pulled from under him. It was a very humbling experience this punk kid worried about his own worthlessness, so I went home that day and wrote about it the only way I know how: in comic form. Flipping through some old sketch books I took a character from some story I was trying to write in high school that would actually work for what I was trying to write, and then pumped out a script within the next week.

I’d like to say that I got started on and finished the story in haste, but that post graduate depression was kicking in pretty hard at that point. I finished about a page and a half, and then it sat on my drafting table to be continued on and started over several times within the next year. Still, I kept thinking back to this story and that homeless stranger. Finally I decided to just dive into cartooning and not let anything hold me back, so I sold most of everything I had just to get it out of the way. Extreme, yes, but well worth it. In the end it still took me about another 2 months to start on the story again … :/ … but I’ve been going non-stopped since then. In the end I’m glad that I had both that experience and this story to serve as a kind of wake up call. I really feel as if comics is what I should have been doing all along.

I’ll be posting some design sketches and more commentary on this story throughout the next few weeks.