WARNING THIS IS A HUGE WALL OF TEXT ABOUT ABERRUNT! SUMMARY: I AM STORYBOARDING VOLUME 3!
to preface this, i've always loved art but i also have bipolar disorder (among a myriad of other fun comorbid problems i’ll spare you the details of lol), and so i have long periods of depression. for a span of probably a decade, i didn't draw a single thing, but i was still a creative person and was still always thinking of stories. since i was too bummed out to draw, i decided i would become a writer!! while you can see how that turned out, at the time it seemed like a great idea, and so in 2013 i signed up for Nanowrimo with the intention of writing a story that i would want to read about little creatures having a big adventure in even bigger weird meat. it was... certainly a story! i hit 50k easily, finishing with over 60k, and i was really proud of myself!
and then i shelved it and just did roleplaying on insanejournal for a couple years. i'm a simple man with very little pride and this is why i can admit this to you, one of perhaps five people who will read this cringe wall of text on neocities dot org. while roleplaying is a fun creative outlet, it still left me feeling very hollow since it wasn't what i wanted to be doing, just adjacent to it. then, in 2014, the video game Outlast released, and it felt so directly targeted at me, specifically, i dug out my Wacom Graphire tablet, fired up Autodesk Sketchbook, and DREW FANART. it wasn't good, but it was enough to get me back into drawing and by 2015 all i could think about was making comics. Around this time, while i was still heavily focused on doing goofy fanart & fun roleplay askblogs, i was making my first character designs, most of them in traditional media, but i made my first character designs in Paint Tool SAI as well.
I wouldn't work up the courage to make an actual comic until 2017 when I got Clip Studio Paint, which I aggressively recommend to anyone who wants to make comics! it goes on sale for dirt cheap several times a year and the basic version has a TON of features. By this time i had a lot of great art friends both in my area and online, and I was Really Feeling It, BAYBEEE!!! i made a prequel/test comic about a few of the characters in the main story and was really happy and excited that i was able to make my own stories come to life after doing mostly fanart/roleplay based stuff for so long.
some deep lore is that when i showed this comic to my therapist and explained the main story to me, she pointed out that it had a lot of parallels with what i'd been working through with her, and it blew my shoes AND socks off when i realized she was right.
i'm terrible at being autobiographical. i've tried a few times here and there, and it's only left me feeling miserable and exposed and stupid. i really admire people who are able to communicate personal things like that, but i've come to accept that it's just not something i'm good at or even comfortable with. what i can do, though, is explore those things from a more fantastical remove. it does make me feel childish sometimes, i will admit, to be exploring my deep psychological traumas with technicolor bugs who sometimes do cusses, but overall it's very cathartic since it's only explicitly clear to me which parts are just made up for dramatic effect and which ones are painfully real. i leave this DEEP LORE off of the comic proper because it's really not meant to be such an embarrassing bummer, it's supposed to be, in the end, a story where you figure out that you're not so bad. a little gross and offputting and embarrassing, sure, but not so bad.
ANYWAY. VOLUME 1 (OF NINE LOL PLEASE SEND HELP) was finished in 2019, 2020 my tablet was out of commission for six months and then i had to wait another month after that to replace it after waiting to be refunded and for the replacement to actually be in stock on this aggressively anti-art continent, and in 2021 i finished VOLUME 2!! a bunch of other stuff happened that i did write out but man oh man i'm tired of writing down bummers so don’t worry about it. I MADE IT THROUGH THE BUMMERS & VOLUME 3 IS IN PRODUCTION!
The scripts for all nine volumes are... pretty much done. I've learned over the years that making strict scripts just doesn't work for me - i'm changing dialog and moving stuff around up to the last second, and work best when i am just drawing out my ideas versus writing them down. i have to date never been able to set a page limit and stick to it, though for my own sanity i am hoping VOLUME 3 stays under 100 pages lmao!!
VOLUME 3 is currently in the storyboard phase! getting started is always the hardest part for me, but i'm hoping to have the boards sorted out in a week. that may be too ambitious, but this volume is one of my favorites and i'm very excited and motivated to bring it to life!
i think my chief challenge for this volume, since after two of them i know i can do it and have a pretty good pipeline, will be upping my composition game and making some style changes. for the first two i wanted to go for the 'painted background and bold celshade characters, saturday morning cartoon style' vibe, and while it kinda worked? i think it can be a lot more cohesive, and that i have too much blank page real estate that could be better filled with squiggly meat. i do worry about abruptly changing style midstream, but it's not like i have a publisher or an enormous fanbase - the only person i have to please here is me, and it would please me to make a more consistently rendered comic!
i'll update this post as i have more updates to make! i will do a little thing with dates on it i think. idk, this post got totally out of control but i've never told Aberrunt's backstory before and this was as good a place as any haha!
