Birdstacking comics number 1

genre jumping

i love different genres of fiction, having the same authorial voice telling stories using various tropes, giving a spin to ancient ideas and showing us a facet we have not seen. it’s all very highfalutin. so pardon me if i get a little flowery with my verbiage.

i thought the one man anthology structure would be an interesting way to tell my various stories, as they all occur in the same world, just shifting times. they do share some characters, or familial ties. i want to plant seeds for future stories and reasons for plot points in other stories to give an internal logic. i do have story beats mapped out, but between those is room to improvise, which ultimately may change things, but that’s causality, that’s storytelling.

anyway, i figure, with my little world i am exploring i should move around in cliches, in imagery, in story spheres to show the various stages, the myriad voices, the differences and similarities of life and what it consists of. to give a consistency to the reality and at time unreality that i am sharing with you, the reader.

i am playing in diverse houses here, i have an adventure story, with fighting and magic and jokes, essentially a dungeon crawl. i love fantasy stories, michael moorecock, tolkien, china mieville, and m. john harrison, they tell these strange wonderful stories within and break free of the classic interpretation, or in tolkien’s case, creates/ refines the ideals. i also love rpgs, haven’t played one in years, but listening to real play podcasts, my interest has been reignited. so the Megaldonnas was born, my love of fantasy and puns, joined forces to follow this found family, this girl gang, into the underground of Birdstacking, the eponymous city, to see what they can find. wizards larders, monsters, acceptance, a home.

skullduggery is my procedural, though more an exploration of the hypocrisy both of the legal system and thumbing my nose at the superhero genre (though i do love superheroes) the vigilante, moving outside the law and the unintended circumstances that can have, in the macro and the micro. i will let the story tell more about that on its own.

sorethumb is probably the oldest idea i have here, though, it has morphed considerably since inception. i am not sure of the genre it would fit comfortably into, perhaps magical realism, or urban fantasy, not really in the same vein as jonathan carroll, neil gaiman or charles de lint, but somewhere in that general area. as you have now read, it’s a displacement story, an outsiders perspective, and really that’s everyone’s story, none of belong but we do our best to pretend to fit into the square peg presented by society at large.

in the end, really i hope to tell an entertaining story or stories, that has some interesting images. this is my meditation, my way of speaking my peace, my mind, myself in all its myriad facets and just waving hello to the world, and hoping for a hello, or head nod back in acknowledgment. (can i get a ‘sup’) i hope you all get something out of it, and will join me again very soon

i hope to put this out quarterly. and as some stories finish, new ones will begin, i have a lot on and in my mind.

ttyl

-j