Pages

Friday, April 1, 2011

Tokens Only aka I Could Be Happy On My Own

Franz Ferdinand - Live Alone

I'll be talking a little bit about my comic, Tokens Only, today. It's something I've wanted to get back into for awhile, and I wanted to give a little explanation on it's hiatus.


Tokens Only Strikes Back by ~spicypeanut on deviantART

So here you can see the new promo image from the series. High contrast, muted tones, it's what my art is morphing into. It's weird when you steer your work into new territory. It's actually frightening to venture into unknown places with yourself, and get amazingly overwhelming responses from it. I've been getting a lot of thumbs up approvals from peers and editors. And more work as well & that's the important part. But I've been feeling I wanted a change in my art for awhile, and while it was a little scary to take that dip into the deep end, I'm glad I did. Risk is a good thing kids. Take your chances.

A couple of things: When I started Tokens Only I originally wanted to write something that was akin to Scrubs. I'm not gonna lie, it's my favorite sitcom. It hits all my nerd and emotional buttons in one fell swoop, and it made for a lot of comfort nights when I was going through some rough shit. I still watch the seasons when I get depressed over something. It's literally my comfort food. But the more and more I watch it I realize that while I love it, I want my own book to be it's own thing. I am very much a guy who has gone his own way in life, and I want my work to reflect that. Just look at my work - I could easily conform to making superhero stuff (which is totally fine, I still love me some Batman!) but it's just not me. And that's all I know how to be. But enough wearing my heart on my sleeve...

So I got a great book from my pal Zach called Story and it's helped my writing tremendously. We sat down with the story and he walked me through the story points I had. One of the greatest compliments I've received from him is that I'm a naturally gifted storyteller... man that's awesome! So anyways, when we took these story points down I started to realize I wanted to go deeper and add elements of classic literature character development to my story. While broad comedy with good character development is a great approach (Scrubs) I find myself wanting more.

Tokens Only will still be a Webcomic and free online. The goal will always be for it to be a finite story, and collected into book format though. I have other stories I want to tell, but this is the one I wanted to do first. It's closest to my heart right now. I also will be veering away from traditional webcomic traditions. I'll be on a consistent schedule when work allows, but it's going to be a long form comic. Not in strip form or short arc format. Much love to my webcomic brothers and sisters out there, but the story I wanna tell just doesn't fit into the typical webcomic mold.

A lot of that is what has led to the hiatus. I did have all intentions of launching and updating consistently after NYCC last year but the opportunities I got from that convention were too good to pass up. In that time I've done work for Threadless, Lord of the Rings, Uhh Yeah Dude, 3 independent comic anthologies and I'm working on a short story with my pal Dave Hendrick. But what it really came down to was that I got into a story that wasn't feeling quite right and even though I wrote it out before hand I wasn't happy with it. I refuse to churn out crap just to be productive. Like I've said before... Tokens Only is my heart comic. It's me talking about life through my characters & a lot of my experiences are in this book. I'm not one to really wear my heart on my sleeve all that much, so it's been a challenge but it's what I want to do.

So that's what it is. My goal is to have the book back and going by June and I'm excited to be working on this again finally.

God keep ya,
Zak

1 comment: