▀▄▀▄▀▄ the slashblog ▀▄▀▄▀▄
on finishing things and how many things i want to finish
posted 2:30am july 29th, 2024
[matpat voice] HELLLLO internet! i’,m writing a blog post. heres shit im thinking about tonight:
▀ slashfic and its amount of incompletion
▀ my friend fizz’s album ‘villians of the labyrinth’
▀ the precure album lyric book i have to finish before going to new york city in august
gonna break these down one by one
▀ slashfic and its amount of incompletion
i think about this one pretty much all the time. ive been drawing marcy and her color coded friends since, uhhhh, november 2018. pretty much december at that point though. point is! that’s a while. as the time of writing this blog post, ive got 13 pages of slashfic added onto the site. and not even all of those are actual comic pages! not gonna count the number though..counterintuitive
but i’ve made so many more pages than that. a lot of them were for the original “graphic novel” version of the story that takes place like, two years after the story im writing now takes place. something like that. i dont know if youve noticed this but im not really a timeline sort of guy. who the fuck cares. anyway
yeah so like, anyway after i realized that i didnt really have the time, skill, knowhow, time management skills, fortitude, penis, etc to make an entire graphic novel in my free time (especially one that focused on like, the comedy of being unable to move on from a breakup LOL) i pivoted to what we now know as Slashfic Singles, little comic strips that explore the characters being in a band together and slowly forming a Scene. what in the FUCK was i talking about
ok right yeah but this kind of started to quickly become its own serial plot. which im SO cool with! but a part of me i’ve been trying to wrestle into submission for a while is that i’m a perfectionist. i’m in a way capable of letting myself half ass something. i full ass everything. slashfic single? full ass. tape girl single art? full ass. peach rings tour poster? full ass. kmoy lyric book? full ass. one off joke comic about marcy? full ass. wait. that ones not a good idea. not every idea needs full ass completion. in fact nothing needs the same amount of effort as anything else. figuring out how much effort each specific thing needs i feel like is one of those things that really differentiates the rookie and the master..
anyway so yeah like.
around, shit, this time last year, i was trying to quickly wrap up a “vol 1” of slashfic singles so i could pitch it as a zine to san francisco indie comics press (and store) Silver Sprocket. Josh PM from bay area ska band Sad Snack works there! here’s a pic of us chilling:
photo by sofia dupre!!! check them out here!
so the sprint to get that zine done helped a lot! i didn’t finish though. i got too ambitious with the scope of it visually i think. i wanted everything to feel like it was taken on digicam (which is Sooo in now btw… just saying i was on this shit before anybody else). there was a 4-page scene talking about the anxiousness i feel reading other artist’s comics (but retrofitted to be about music, obviously). and then like 7 other pages i never even got to cuz i couldnt finish this 4 page thing. i think i wanted to do it “right”.
right now though, i don’t even think i care about doing it “right”. i just want to do Any of it, at All. worrying about doing it ‘right’ KEPT me from doing it all. i just want to make anything whenever i can right now. so right now this means quick joke strips that focus on punchlines over grand artistic statement. things that are FUNNIER when they look less finished.
▀ my friend fizz’s album ‘villians of the labyrinth’
check out the album here!
my friend fizz……fizz is awesome. fizz is my best friend. we’ve been drawing each other’s characters since 2021 and we’ve been friends for even longer than that. we are the same age and have basically the same dreams of projects so we are kind of like shonen protag rivals. do you know what i mean.
anyway so pink noise is fizz’s work-in-progress rpg game about surrealist lesbians who are obsessed with each other to various degrees of unhealthiness. they’ve been making for i think even longer than i’ve been drawing slashfic. most of this time is time in the oven much like me but they finally released this album. and its like, YEah. fuck yeah. because its like, you listen to this shit and its like IMMEDIATE brainworms. ok maybe not immediate but like PRETTY immediate. anyway
the best part of this album is that it exists. before this bazil and clemency and daedalus (these are characters in the video game) were just like, Concepts. if you knew the plan you knew the plan. but now, through something as like, holistic as a short debut album, these concepts are rather Things and Leitmotifs that can like, follow you throughout your life. that’s something i was always so jealous of as a comics artist who wanted to be a musician. You can’t read comics while doing the dishes, or driving around, or walking around. but music CAN follow you throughout your day.
and they’re kind of nervous right now that it could’ve been better but that’s just making me realize like, if you waited til it was perfect you’d Explode. it’d kill you. you’d die. but instead they put the work in that needed to be done so the thing could be done and then youre DONE. and you put it out. and then you work on the next thing. and then you keep doing it and you have a DISCOGRAPHY!!! which brings me to the last thing.
▀ the precure album lyric book i have to finish before going to new york city in august
so i’ve been working on this lyric book that’s meant to serve as a companion piece to my friend Kayleigh ‘kMoy’ Malloy’s “The Precure Album” (an album about the protagonist ‘Val’ and their obsession with fictional anime character Princess Precure, who also serves as an allegory for their struggles with addiction and substance abuse) for like, i dont know. since march? april? i don’t know. i took a long break between then and now. but like
me (passenger seat) and Kayleigh (driver's seat) sitting in the car during the Catbite LA show in April 2024 while I am showing her all the sketches i made while coming up with my take on Princess Precure's design for the lyric book..historical moment..also that's Samantha from The Marijuana Brass in the back seat. photo by Javier "El Homie" Andrade, also of The Marijuana Brass.
how im feeling about the lyric book right now is like, i finally got some forward momentum on slashfic again and that felt great but i was like fuck. i have this whole like, unfinished thing. where i like have all this work but its literally not even on my computer its just papers on the floor in my room. i dont even know what i have and what i dont anymore. i gotta like sort this all out
but then when i looked at it again i kind of realized like, ok. all the sketches are here. half the finished art is here. all you gotta do is finish it now. cuz im like Dying to get a substantial slashfic thing out. i think ive been release starved for like, a while. havent put out a colored slashfic page in a year next month
but like, i have all this stuff for this lyric book, and i gotta finish it, because thats an Obligation i have to kayleigh and myself and sofia and cool chris. (and if i finish it before august kayleigh wants me to give a copy of it to Jeff Rosenstock at the Jeff Rosenstock Catbite show in Brooklyn this August, which i will be at because i am going to NYC for the kMoy/Peach Rings shows in brooklyn and philly to run merch and sell slashfic stickers. ANYWAY) all the sketches are done. all the outlines half the lineart is done. i dont have to think anymore i can just work. i don't need to wait to "figure out" how to do this lineart for this one pose i just have to draw it and then tweak it if i want. and its not like im saying "it doesnt have to be 'perfect'" im saying that it needs to be done. so i can be done with more stuff. i have this crazy amount of things im gonna do and im never gonna get to do them all if im taking this long at every step
so anyway that is why i want to finish things quick over and over until i have a billion things. so i can rule the world
-anj