A Strawberry Memory

In February 2017, I was making one of my many long walks from the train station to my work. It was cold and windy weather, and for some reason that weather always inspires me. Maybe it’s because, being from the cold flatness of southern Ontario, there is a lot of that weather and it gets my creative energy going. Here in Japan there’s not so much of that, but on my way to work there’s a stretch where I have to cross barren rice fields and there is nothing in the way to block the cold winds. Usually I would not look forward to this walk but at that time my mind was piecing together a story. However, it wasn’t this particular story.

The story I was thinking of would later become The Haunted Me. It would be a real story, a story done not in the four panel strips that I had been doing nearly exclusively since 2001, it would be a regular comic book format with full page layouts.

I knew I just couldn’t jump in and start doing full page layouts again. I had to do something else first, something not as challenging, so I could rework my brain to try to visualize stories as pages rather than individual panels. A shorter self-contained story would be a great way to do this. and while I was working on this I could refine the story of The Haunted Me and improve it.

I thought about having Wren, a character from depression comix, have her own little short story. I thought about her being bullied as a kid for her freckles, as I was so many years ago. And having the one teacher that made her feel strong in her own way. She would be in a bar reflecting on it, and that would be the whole story, ending on what would be page 5.

Starting it was hell. The first page was incredibly difficult. I sketched everything out on pieces of paper beforehand like I did on A Heart Made of Glass way back, Then when I fired up Clip Studio to start drawing digitally, it took a while to get the feel of the larger canvas. Then I did the second page. It was hard, but I could start to feel a momentum build. Then the third page. By the time I got to the fifth page, I knew I had to keep going. Okay, it’s a bit of a coincidence, but let’s have her bully show up so she can take some sweet revenge. It was supposed to end on page 12. Then I thought, no, let’s have it be the story of how Wren and Robin meet. And let’s have Raven show up just because they’re enemies in depcom and we can show them as friends and mess everything up. So now the story was running on all four cylinders and I couldn’t stop. The 5 page story became 28 in the end.

There was also some ideas that got tossed. I had an idea about Wren and Robin meeting and they would have a misunderstanding and start a barroom brawl. I thought it would make a great cover page showing them fighting each other being as how they were loved as a couple in depcom. Thankfully I tossed it and made their meeting about kindness and giving so that we could see them at their very beginning and know that they were right for each other.

When I finished page 28, I was really proud of myself for having completed it. It was the first complete book since Book 1 of A Heart Made of Glass as I had not completed anything else in the meantime. There were a number of false starts so ending this book meant a lot to me. It was a great confidence booster.

I was going to jump right into Hattie (a working title of The Haunted Me) as the last page suggests but I really wanted to tell more of Raven’s story. She was a highlight to me of the story and I wanted to put more of a spotlight on her so I instead began work on the 8 page story Later That Night.

Random Notes:

• The Old British Pub is based on The Olde English Parlour on the corner of King and Bridgeport in Waterloo Ontario where I had played myself a few times.
  
• When Raven calls the guy in the next booth “”sideburns” I originally had her call him “Stephen Stills” but I didn’t think anyone but me would get the reference.
  
• Misigi was not initially intended to be Wren’s girlfriend, I decided it at the very end of page 12 after she gets told to leave the bar. That’s why there’s very little reference to them being in a relationship until the last few panels of that page. I wanted to make her day really shitty.
  
• I didn’t make a cover for this book, and although I really wanted to I never got around to it. I really should.