Later That Night

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here. Finished! I’m really happy to have a second completed comic on this site — it’s a rare event I complete anything so it feels good to put this aside. I am desperately trying to avoid starting work on “The Morning After” and make this a trilogy. There’s a part of me that really wants to do this, but the other part of me is like no, you really have to start Hattie at some point, and this is the best time to start. Some reflections: I was able to do a page a week of this and do my other work as well, which means I am producing faster, a good sign. Wren’s sexuality is a part of this and Strawberry Memory but is never explicitly mentioned. It is never mentioned in depression comix as well. This is really on purpose — I wanted the audience not to identify her through that one characteristic. She is more than that, and I wanted her to be more than the “lesbian character”. Pairing her as I did with a heterosexual character — Raven — was interesting for me because of how they approach things. Wren doesn’t have much to say regarding Raven’s experience, but knows she has to say something. It was also fun to set up reader expectation a little. Wren, who we know is a lesbian, shares a really small bed with a nude woman in it and nothing sexual happens at all. Speaking about nude Raven it was challenging to draw a SFW comic with a nude woman in it. Patreon keeps me honest. Wren is not happy about Raven being there. It was going to be talked about at one point but I wanted to keep the focus on Raven’s situation. The reason why Wren soured on Raven before this night was because Raven was the first person Wren came out to, and instead of being supportive was the exact opposite: Raven’s response was “I guess I can’t stay at your place anymore.” Trust and respect are huge things for Wren and hearing that literally broke Wren’s heart — she understood that Raven did not have the same respect for her as Wren did Raven. In reality Raven was just the kind of person who said dumb hurtful things all the time and didn’t really mean it, but having those dumb hurtful things being said about Wren’s sexuality was too much. Because of that incident Wren was very hesitant to come out to anyone else for a long time. Whew! This is a lot! Just read the comic and if you have any comments to add please do!

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here. This is the 7th of 8 pages (as I write this I’m over half-finished the 8th page) and it’s time for Wren to get her two cents into this proceedings. I thought of a few Bauhaus songs to use on this page but I ended up using “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”, it really fit thematically with the comic. Initially I was going to use Ziggy Stardust, as Bauhaus does an amazing cover of it, but I thought an obscure song that the two of them know enough to sing really hinted at the depth of their friendship.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here. This is the continuation of Raven’s monologue. The question I am asking here I think is “Isn’t this a kind of assault ?” Raven doesn’t say no but she doesn’t feel she has the power to say “No.” If she says no things will get worse, as if this is something she knows from experience. It’s not really consent if you feel the possibility of violence is real. Something I have tried to do with this comic (and all my comics since I got back in 2011) is stay away from the copy paste panel. I’ve tried to vary things panel by panel even though very little movement happens to make it clear you’re reading a comic and not some text over a repeated static picture. I’ve found that when I read comics made by cut and paste it really does pop out at me that it is cut and paste — I think our brain automatically looks for patterns and lets us know when it finds matches. It helps immensely that I enjoy drawing these two characters.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here. This is the page that begins Raven’s monologue and I had this written pretty much during the scene in Strawberry Memory where Raven and Wren are at the bar. I couldn’t use it then — it was too long and it would have completely derailed the story, but I thought it would be suited better as sort of a middle of the night thing to say when it’s more OK to be completely honest. Unfortunately it’s not that exciting — I thought it would be best for Raven to never face Wren during the dialogue so she always keeps her back to her.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the full comic here. Panels 2 and 4 look like copy and paste panels but they aren’t. The neat thing about going digital is I can use my inked work as a pencil layer and get panels looking relatively the same. I do think copy and paste is not good — the eye can detect it and at times can slip the reader out of the moment. By drawing the panel again it looks different enough so that it feels like a still camera yet it doesn’t have that feeling like it’s exactly the same, like we’re looking at a still subject rather than a photograph of a still subject. I did a lot of copy and paste with my earlier comics, but since starting depcom I have been trying not to do any at all. What I have tried to capture here is the annoyance of trying to sleep in a bed with someone else in it, especially when you’re not a couple and your tolerance for things is lower. The conversation about nakedness is based on a naive belief I had as a kid that adults sleep naked because they are adults, not because of, er, anything else. Now I’m like Wren. Washing sheets is a pain in the ass. Raven’s mom has appeared in depression comix #362 and it was interesting for me to sort out her family life in the comic. Although I had written the original script with no mention of Raven’s mom at all it’s been clear to me that the role the mom plays in this scene is actually vitally important. I didn’t realize it when Raven made the offhand comment about “boyfriends” on the first page, but it made me realize that Raven’s dad is no longer in the picture and Raven’s mom is leading a life that is really stressing out Raven. I believe that when we develop characters we give them lives subconsciously and we deke them out through the creative process.

You can skip my commentary and go right to the comic here. When I was working on Strawberry Memory, there was a lot of dialogue I was constantly making and throwing away, lots of subplots I had in my head but eventually had to toss off to keep the story going straight towards the destination I had planned. When Raven starts talking on pages 17 to 18 there was a LOT more dialogue there but I recognized that instead of going towards yet another direction I needed to cut it. But I knew Raven had a story I wanted to tell and eventually it became Later That Night. I hope you read it and like it. It’s a little different in how I approached drawing it, it’s 9 panels a page and has a layer of colour on it. I wanted to get the feeling of darkness and it seemed a simple way of doing it.