Goodnight, Everybody!

I guess the least I could do is explain what's going on here. You see, it started out simple enough: I was working a ton of overtime during hours I'm not used to, so by the time I got home I neither had the desire to draw anything, nor the ability to draw a straight line. But things started to get a bit weirder as time went on, which I won't go into because that's not really what matters here. Long story short, META-FICTION IS DEAD. I've realized that the story was a bad idea, and was always a bad idea, though forty-some-odd reboots should have tipped me off sooner. Of course, this doesn't mean I'm done drawing comics altogether, I'm just letting this particular story die. I'm going to take the time to explain my reasons for this, but if you just want to know what I'll be going from here, skip down to the part labeled THE FUTURE.

What it ultimately comes down to is that it was impossible to pace this properly. Going by the plot outline I made a couple months ago, it would have taken five pages for anything related to the underlying plot to actually happen. That would have been unreasonably slow-paced for a bi-weekly print comic, but as a web comic with more scheduling issues than a one-plane international airport on Christmas? I've always stressed that a web comic needs much different pacing than its big brother, the printed comic, but it seems I'm really bad at taking my own advice.

The other problem was with the plot itself. The story was to follow Meta, a minor comic book character who became self-aware and vowed to overthrow the writer in an act of revenge for killing her family in her back story. But since she had little chance of this actually working, she had to devise several plans involving more central, more popular characters that couldn't be as easily written out as her. The problem here is that Meta would have to be an invader into already-fleshed-out, perfectly functional comic books for this to work.

This would have been fine for the Ace Chapters, where Ace would have been given a portion of Meta's powers in order to defend himself from the writer's plans to end the comic by killing him, but is later revealed that he was in fact given all of her powers to become the "new Meta" in the event of her death.

I had also written the Corino Chapters (Corino is Kinji redesigned, remember) with this very notion in mind and had it explain Meta's own back story. You see, Corino's story was supposed to take place over several years going from Lovecraftian shenanigans in 1919 to getting into run-ins with the mob in 1928. As he grew older, Corino would have been an academic tutor to the adopted daughter of the Malvasias, a mob family. The daughter, Alexia, finds out that Corino is a mage, and has him take her on as his apprentice so she can find her real family's killers. Through this, she eventually manages to break out of the comic and become Meta. All of this turns out to have been Meta's doing in the first place, since she exists outside of regular continuity and had been a friend to Corino since his story first started. It's rather complicated, but it would have worked according to the outline I had made. But like the Ace Chapters, it served the main plot without detracting from the world itself.

Then we start getting into some trouble. I had mentioned that the plot would have started in Chapter 5. That was when the writer would have gotten fed up with Meta messing with his plans (at this point she would have revived Ace from death and empowered him, and cut a storyline short). He would have created a team and empowered them to kill Meta and any characters she had interacted with. The team? Zweihander, Freedom, Jeremy Coinsnap the Lone Gunman, and Joe and Jane from Accounting. Sounds fine at first, but this would have meant that Zweihander and the gang would be displaced from their own world, a world I liked, and the lot of them would be nothing more than antagonists that pursued the characters in each of their stories. But that wasn't too bad compared to what came next.

There was to supposed to be a world based on characters that I had created a long time ago, but never had any use for. It was basically a Justice League-esque story involving this team of superheroes. Here's the big issue I had with that: one of the things I posted on DeviantART (back when I still posted on DeviantART) depicted characters meant to exist in this world. Back then, the idea wasn't even in its infancy anymore, it was more in its adolescence. That was, what? Two years ago? I've had a lot of time since then to develop the characters and their world in case I had a chance to use them. I had developed this big back story behind the world and themes which justified having these superheroes running around.

Basically, there was this big war for independence. During this war, it was discovered that the government had produced this sort of chemical and put it in their army's food supplies, which enhanced their abilities. The resistance ends up stumbling upon this and accidentally becoming exposed to it themselves, and after winning the war, it becomes spread around the general populace. Fast-forward to 15 years later, where people eventually realize that the chemical never stops increasing one's abilities, and it affects people differently, based on their goals and personalities. So now everyone has super powers. But people adapt to this, which makes it strange that one particular group suddenly decides to dress up in spandex and vows to fight the crime that the now-super-powered police force has no difficulty doing already. So they're more of a beloved spectacle than anything, and people just like hearing about them even though they don't really do anything.

It turns out that the founder of the group, a woman named Angela, is really only trying to make a name for herself, since she feels like she's constantly in the shadow of her father, one of the heroes of the revolution. Similarly, the rest of her teammates have their own issues and none of them really look up to Angela, each of them having differing opinions on who should lead the group, what their mission should be, etc. So it starts off being this sort of deconstruction of the kind of people that would wear a bright costume and go fight crime, but we get to see the characters develop to the point that they eventually become a true inspiration and legitimately save the day. The underlying theme to the whole thing was supposed to be, "It takes a freak to put on a mask; it takes a hero to live up to it."

Hopefully you can see why I was reluctant to water it down and just make it a justification for why Angela was together with Meta and the others. Even with the final character in the group, for whom I had to completely fabricate a story and a world from the ground-up, I had this problem. See, the idea was that you had this debonair gentleman named Gabriel dressed up in an expensive suit and tailcoat, dining and ballroom dancing with beautiful women, and killing zombies.

Sounds simple enough, right? But then I got to thinking about the world this takes place in. It was basically just a world where the dead tend not to stay dead. What would a world in this situation be like? Obviously, it would place a pretty damn big emphasis on death. The living dead would be considered people whose souls failed to go on into the next realm, and you couldn't just make steel-reinforced coffins to keep them from getting out. Because then you'd never realize that Uncle Jeff's soul hadn't moved on, and he'd just be trapped in his box for all eternity. So you hire people like Gabriel. "Pallbearers," we'll call them. These are the guys who make sure that the dead can move on. They do this by sanctifying the body (which usually involves embedding a piece of blessed silver in the dead's skull). And if the dead do arise, it is their job to destroy the body of the deceased since, while it may not be the ideal way to move on, a soul with no body to inhabit will have no choice but to do so. Once the deceased is buried, we observe a week of mourning, and if they don't arise, then we'll have a gala celebration in honor of his passing on!

There's so much more I can do with that concept other than, "This stuff happens, then Gabriel teams up with Meta." So that's what ultimately forced me to cancel Meta-Fiction. It was a tough decision, but it was necessary. Blame the fact that I chose now of all times to actually become a writer, as opposed to someone who just writes stuff.

THE FUTURE

Right now, I'm working on the next Zweihander comic, which will actually be a remake of the first story featuring them, the second chapter of Newtrul. I'm doing this because I love those characters, and I love writing them. But the chapters they were in are just painful to read now that I've gotten better, and there's much more I can dowith them. Sheriff Justice Freedom will be in it this time, and I've adjusted the characters' personalities a bit. I've hit a bit of writer's block with ending the opening battle against Machinegunhands, specifically how to shift to Zweihander and Jeremy Coinsnap the Lone Gunman tracking down the big bad. Before, I was just able to cut back and forth between the two concurrent stories, so I can't go by that. But I've got the first eight pages or so all written and thumbnailed out, so I'll be able to start working on it as soon as I confirm my route.

Like I touched on before, I plan on expanding the individual stories that were going to be included in Meta-Fiction into their own comics, maybe even get something published. But, that's kind of a big milestone I'm not the least bit prepared to grapple with at the moment, but it's certainly something I'd like to get into someday, after I get the hang of producing things more quickly. I could definitely see the Angela and Gabriel stuff as their own comics, and I think Corino's universe would work best as a series of one-shots. Sort of a "Mystery Theater with Corino de Moura," in keeping with the old horror publications that inspired the redesign.

I've even started thinking about how I can use the characters from the Ace Chapters again, and I've written out the concept of what is basically my attempt at writing, essentially, a Shin Megami Tensei story, something I'd really like to do. I mean, I love reading about religion and mythology, and I always have. Then I played this game where it was like, "Holy crap! I'm fighting Ahriman with Vishnu, Beelzebub, and Metatron!" So it really opens the door for me to write a story where, for instance, Apep kills Ra, which covers the world in an eclipse and has gods like Ammut, Khepera, and Sekhmet fighting over the right to become the next sun god by sponsoring humans that share similar ideals with them. For instance.

So yeah, ending Meta-Fiction does not in anyway mean I'm done with comics. Right now I'm like a kid in a candy store- I have all these ideas, and I have to decide which one I want to work on right now. I'll stick with Zweihander for the moment, but we'll see.