2020, comic
Two once close friends, now distant after the utterly bizarre happens to one of them.
Spike and Sydney had their friendship torn by Spike's mysterious spine growths. It's up to them to decide if they should forever stay apart to avoid hurting each other... or if they'll come together despite the spines between them.
An unfinished project from 2020.
The Other Half
This project was only halfway finished. Pretty far considering my skills at the time. Though since I don't intend to finish this, here's what would've happened in the end.
- A flashback to the past where Spike's condition gets worse/the spines make it harder to navigate and interact with others
- The spines ends up hurting Sydney & that starts a rift in their friendship between them
- In the present, Sydney arrives at his apartment and finds the spines have overtaken due to him holing up out of fear of harming others
- He gets cut down, and Sydney apologizes for abandoning him. The state of the spines condition / whether they'll grow back or not is left ambiguous.
In Retrospect...
Spines was made at a very unpleasant part of my life. Basically, a combination of irl drama & the pandemic (and generally having a lot pulled from underneath me) snowballed into a massive depressive episode. It's not really a time I like to go into much, but I think it's important for the context of why this piece failed.
This was for a semester-long independent project done during my sophomore year of college, Fall 2020 (aka. still during said episode). The initial pitch was about exploring the idea of the hedgehog's dilemma though the use of a mystery spine growth on one of the two characters. But in retrospect I think I was putting a lot of the energy from that time into it, especially with how spike would end up isolating himself later on in the story (at that time I had cut myself off from others as well). While the story was written out and halfway drawn, after the class was over I lost the motivation to go back to it and ended up shelving the project entirely as it was causing more stress & was honestly a miserable experience to work on. I was constantly running into creative block or periods of demotivation, then by the end I rushed the pages to meet the deadline.
But outside of the depressive episode, there were other technical factors that lead to the projects failure, such as trying to take on 16+ pages of comics during a full semester of college, during an unhealthy state, and especially after just getting back into making comics. Even if it was a one-shot, this project was overly ambitious for me at the time as I still hadn't figured out the best workflow for me, my limits, or even taken a comics class to better understand the process of actually making one. So while I didn't think it at first, I was biting off way more than I could chew.
In short: Spines was a project made under not-ideal circumstances with both my mental health and a lack of judgement in what I can do both playing into why I didn't end up finishing it.
In the future, I'd like to attempt another serious project again. But I think that'd have to be much later when I feel ready to handle it. I know after this project folded, I ended up leaning into comedy so I could have something more lighthearted to work on. I think comedy will still be my main thing in the long run since it's genuinely something I enjoy working on, but having other genres under my belt would also be good in the long run.
- Nat, 2023