Birds & Wolves: Later Never Comes

Hey, everyone!

So, as you may know, I recently published (with Lulu) the first chapter of a long long story I’m working on, called Birds & Wolves. Well, luckily for you no one but me got a copy, because it was missing a page!!!!

That was my fault, but I’m here to tell you that I’ve now just updated the book so it’s ready again for your consumption! And reading. And all. It’s great, promise. Just wait for the finished deal (in like 4 years ha ha).

Click here to check it out!

Anyways, here’s the old post giving a bit of backstory to it all:

A few years ago over a summer, I started a comic that would end up being called “Youth.” It was originally going to be many chapters, detailing a group of kids going through experiences that would end up with their youth ending. I ended up finishing one chapter of it, a whopping 36 pages of decently drawn set-up, talking, and melodrama. (If you reaaally want to read it, here it is: Youth 1.)

But it was too early to really get into drawing some long, complicated, overwrought story. But a lot of the things I was using from real life as events in Youth were terribly compelling, really worthy of being used in a story somehow (one of these particular events I have used in almost every song I’ve ever written, and many many different art projects).

Two semesters ago, while finishing “Good-Bye, The Pig,” I started drafting this story about a man walking into a forest, searching for love that was symbolized by a third of the French flag. It was loosely based on my romantic experiences at the time. And while I loved the forest itself, the story was too easy, too happy. But, at some point, I ended up drawing the forest aflame (what does this say about how things were going in my life?), and was compelled.

Sketchbook examples:

I storyboarded the forest story to somewhere around 25 pages, but decided I shouldn’t draw it for the class I was in (instead I made It Won’t Be Long). So shelved again it went.

Throughout last semester, I began to try to map out a story based a lot on the experiences I’d just been through, some of which had been harrowing (for instance…). Then it came to me to have the story combine the Forest story with the real life story that inspired it. This was exciting, and I combined it with some older story ideas I’ve had (some offshoots of Youth), then, while sketching a particular poignant night from high school debauchery, realized if I combined a real-life story arc from those days, I’d have a fantastic arc of my own.

The arc deals with those zany things like “death” and “growing up.” Really it’s a man’s (a boy’s?) struggle with coming to terms with death as a reality in the face of his own independence as he nears the end of his school days and his days as an independent man. The romantic situation he’s currently in is wrought with unpleasantness, and his mind often wanders to memories of his last years at high school, where he had to go through a similar change in his life.

Sketchbook test page that mirrors directly the first page:

That’s as good a description as I could ever give. There are ten chapters:

1. Later Never Comes
2. Birds
3. Laughing
4. So Cruel
5. Hourglass
6. Say, Fear
7. Arms Are Warm
8. Blue, Blue Jeans
9. Wolves
10. Water

For my internet-publishing assignment, I have completed, to a space above rough-draft yet not finished level, chapter one, “Later Never Comes.”

One can find it here.

That’s 37 pages down. Now for the remaining 363, approx.