Octopus Pie is 17 years old. To mark the occasion, I've tapped the users of Cohost for Asks, and they've thrown me lots of good ones.
Thoughts about comics, games, storytelling and the pleasure of making/sharing art within. I had fun answering these. Thank you to everyone who contributed!
(No one deserves a dozen individual Asks in their feed, so I've collected them all here as quotes. Hope you enjoy!)
@MoxieCat asks:
Are there any comic-making exercises you would recommend to a beginner? Not like "This One Tip Will Instantly Make You An Amazing Cartoonist Overnight," but something to help make practicing more engaging.
There's no need to practice making comics. That's a special thing about the medium. Practice is the process of making and publishing comics. The feedback you get from an audience, your peers, and the process itself will inform your next entry.
The best way to get started is to serialize a simple, low-stakes comic strip that you'll have fun drawing. The worst way is to embark on the greatest epic story you've ever dreamed of telling. (The classic "webcomics" way is to do the former, and let it turn into the latter.)
Where to find an audience? This has been made tougher by social media (as I'll go into more below) but any close-knit online community you're a part of, regardless of its proximity to comics, is a good start.
@HedgeMom asks:
When deciding your story and what to tell, how far ahead is that idea in your head versus when it hits the page?
It's so easy for me to have the plot points planned 5 years out then get locked in and bored!
I wasn't married to any of my long-term plans in comics. They changed all the time, because I was changing all the time, and my passion for an idea would fade the longer I waited. It's a shame when this happens, but it's also fine. It's good to move on.
By necessity, I plot out my games years in advance. But the details are still going to change, because there needs to be an immediacy to the individual pieces. When I commit things to paper (or code), I'm looking to bottle something electric. If an idea has faded to the point of boring you, just imagine how bored the audience will be!
@h-m-m asks:
Do you still think about the "Olly's Organix, the fukken shit" illustration regularly? I think about it somewhere around once every two months
People tell me they think about it pretty often. It's amazing to me that this particular thing, a fake meme within a webcomic, holds meme status in people's minds.
This is the assurance I offer to artists who feel underrecognized: over years, your ideas will burrow into people's minds, build nests in their neural networks. Try as they might, these people will never escape your ideas. Isn't that what you wanted?
OP plot spoilers begin:
@squalamander asks:
I've just finished reading OP again recently so this is some awesome timing :) What made you come around to making Hanna and Larry a couple in The Other Side and OPE?
For me it feels like the perfect arc for Hanna. I went back to find some links to confirm my memories (which are not always reliable).
After school, Hanna and Marek clung together. She was possessed by the sense that there was more to experience, but... she was a lazy stoner, and what they had was sweet, and they had all the time in the world, so why mess with it?
Even before, but certainly after they broke up (over irreconcilable differences they always knew), Hanna had to relearn a lot about romantic and human relationships. The dating world is not full of men who worship her at first glance. People will not bend to her will, no matter how persuasive she is. They will hurt her, and when they do, it probably won't be part of some grand villainous scheme to sabotage her life. It'll be because they're on their own path, and they're as dumb and callous and self-centered as she's been. And if she can find the humility to recognize all this - if she can work through the pain of that recognition - maybe she can share her life with someone who thinks the world of her and drives her insane and is bludgeoned by her all at once.
Spoilers end here.
Anon asks:
Why does it feel like it used to be easier to find webcomics? I used to just stumble into reading new stuff all the time but now I barely know how to find anything interesting even when I'm actively looking.
People who are smarter about tech and its influence over time might be able to expand, but these are my observations:
Independent, discoverable webcomics have declined since the loss of Google Reader/RSS and the rise of social. Online comics have migrated from scrappy websites and loose collectives to social media ecosystems and massive webtoon platforms. It's no longer standard to find new webcomics through other authors' curated link lists, third-party discovery tools like StumbleUpon or the webcomic ad network Project Wonderful, homespun link exchange networks, user-voted top lists, or webcomic-centric blogs. We're all at the mercy of the platform algorithm which, IME, is not good at finding things we'll really enjoy.
This is to speak nothing of the quality of life for webcomic creators, whose options for finding an audience and making any sort of revenue have drastically narrowed, forcing them to move into other fields! As Scott McCloud gravely predicted, if webcomics can't stake out on their own from the newspaper syndication days, they'll "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
Haha of course I'm preaching to the choir on Cohost, so let's see if I can be optimistic. Word of mouth is still powerful. Despite being hammered and distracted by Today's Internet, people still want to engage deeply with art, and often do, and they want to talk about it. To me, microblogging and bite-sized video/image feeds work in opposition to this. I think more often we're recognizing how malnourished we are with this content, and the dearth of intimate online spaces. It's up to us to build more ways to get into things more deeply: collecting, archiving, sharing, discussing.
I'm not so naive as to think we can go back; those scrappy old structures are gone. But people are still making cool and wild and intimate things because they are driven to, often "just" for a few friends and enthusiasts. This is no consolation to artists who struggle to make or supplement a living, but clearly the big platforms are not offering that anymore. Not really. Cheap mass engagement has clouded the significance - the miracle - of even 1 person connecting strongly with what we do. Back in the 00s, we called these people the "true fans", and the theory was that you only needed the direct support of 1000 (give or take) to make a serious go of it. The big platforms have found a very comfortable place between artist and patron, and they're not budging. I have no model to offer. But I still see potential in stepping back from the false promise of platform micro-stardom, and building value in human things.
@AnalogueSheep asks:
Have you ever been approached about an adaptation of Octopus Pie (Live action, animation, game, radio, etc)?
I've had various conversations over the years, but nothing has taken shape. It's not the sort of thing I'm impatient for. The comic is mine, and I like to make things on my own. That means I may never know how much potential it has for a broader audience outside of comics. But it would be nice to see it animated, yeah?
@hthrflwrs asks:
What's your favorite part of the comics creation process?
Nothing in comics is secondary or invisible. No inbetweens, no systems running in the background or just off-screen... there's not even any artwork behind the foreground elements. Every mark is a commitment toward what you see, the final form.
Because of this, a) one person can do it, and b) there is much potential to improvise on the page. This is a recipe for brilliance. A cartoonist with a handle on their tools will put their best marks down first. The energy of these off-the-dome choices are printed in books and enjoyed for years to come.
Cartoonists are often creating the blueprint for film, TV and game adaptations, encompassing story, visuals, acting, cinematography and pacing. The cartoonist can do it all, and they can do it quickly, with no budget. On an individual basis, it is the most empowering medium I have found.
@horseonvhs asks:
first off just wanted to say that your work is incredible, Octopus Pie is a long-time favorite of mine and i’m so excited for Station to Station. your recent revisits to OP especially have been wonderful to read, which sort of leads to this - is there anything you feel that you were able to do through Octopus Pie/comics in general that hasn’t been carried over into the video game space? types of storytelling that feel better told through one over the other, or anything like that. also victor the couch guy is a hero to the people and the Liminal Twist is an all-timer gag, thank you bye
Thank you! That's an interesting thing to consider. With Octopus Pie's story I managed something very elastic, requiring no planning or completion. Posting a page at a time was like building a story brick by brick; it allowed quite a few bit characters to rise into the ensemble, among other happy surprises. That's hard to fathom in a game development timeline, where the story would gestate privately over years.
Of course this would also be true for a self-contained graphic novel, but as far as I'm concerned the ability to really play with the story and cast as you go is unique to serialized comics.
So far I've found games to be perfect for the study of an individual character who the player is embodying. But I'm sure they're perfect for a lot of things I've yet to discover, and that's probably why I'm so fascinated with them at the moment.
@Gwen asks:
How is Jackie doing? Are you planning any more OP like the 2020 and 2022 updates or do you think it's done-done? Will the 2020 and 2022 updates get physical versions?
Haha, oh fine. I do have more ideas for her, as I do for all these characters who still grow alongside me. OP stories have a way of seeping into my thoughts. But putting them to paper would mean an extended break from game development, which I just can't take right now.
The 2 "post" OP stories have been collected in minicomic form, though I can only sell them in limited runs. I hope to someday put them into another collected volume along with the unpublished Hanna/Marigold college story, and (perhaps??) a fourth story to round it out, but that's all on the backburner, at least until PT2 wraps up.
@Meitsme asks:
Guest comics!
- What was it like doing them?
- What was it like asking people to do them for you?
- Is there one you've done for someone else you're especially proud of?
- Is there one for Octopus Pie that effected how you saw or wrote a character?
Ah... what in the modern era resembles guest comics?
Guest comics were a way for a webcomic artist on a "schedule" to take a "break" by posting "filler content" from another "author".
I can't say I have any great recollection of the ones I've made. They were usually done quickly, and much like jam comics, they rarely produced gold. I would sometimes be a dick and try to subvert the comic I was guesting for, by killing a character, prodding at fan theories, or otherwise making a grotesque mockery of my friend's opus. Somewhere, the readers of those comics are still mad at me. But it was always fun to see my work on their front page for a day or two, and ultimately it was a favor for a friend, who'd probably do the same for me.
And I guess that's what remains important. I own the original copies of several guest comics I received over the years, and some are framed on my wall. Though I wouldn't say any of them affected my own process, many of the authors are still dear friends who've had an influence on me. The strips are sort of a relic of the camaraderie we felt back when we were all grinding together.
Anon asks:
What differences do you need to handle between drawing for animation and drawing for comics?
The most obvious difference is layout. Your canvas for animation never changes, and no two scenes or beats stand beside each other on the page. Comics present sequences of images as a single eyeful, creating endless possibilities for harmony and dissonance.
Watching animation is a passive experience. Time in comics is controlled by the reader. Interestingly, both are true in games: I get to decide when to take the wheel or hand things over to the player. (This is why, if you're a cartoonist with some animation chops, you should really try making games. Get over here!)
@lutz asks:
What was your introduction to webcomics? Any favorites or influential touchstones from that time you feel like have faded from the collective memory?
My old internet friend Matt Wilson introduced me to Sluggy Freelance by Pete Abrams in 1999. I didn't go deep with it, but it showed me what was possible. Before this, the newspaper syndication model - and the unlikelihood of being part of it - were all I knew. This comic made Pete a living, and is still going. Isn't it nifty?
The first webcomic I truly loved and wanted to emulate was Elf Life by Carson Fire, which also began around '99 and was hosted on Keenspot. I'd read it in the computer lab at my high school (if the latest page wasn't particularly full of boobs). It was a longform fantasy/romance strip that is mostly lost now. Toward the end it went a little off the rails, as many webcomics do. Carson tried to revive the series a few times, but struggled to find the energy or finances to draw comics or maintain his archives. I hope he knows how his work impacted me, and that I still think his cartooning is immaculate.
@Chicanery asks:
Octopus Pie or Squid Cake?
"Squid Cake", a term I've never used myself, is so ubiquitous among readers that it's almost an alternative title. I imagine if the OP fandom was large and rabid enough to form a rift, the Squid Cake faction would be incredibly cursed and want me dead.
Fortunately, that's not the case. The people who love OP are extremely sweet and normal. Thank you for reading!
