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Hungry the Pig

2022-09-21

6 minute read

Spent yesterday morning tidying my room a bit for the house inspection, then after that I hooked into creative dev for:

Hungry the Pit

I always forget how hard it is initially to come up with anything i'm happy with, and I'm still not well practiced in enduring the long distraction free push required to get to really good creative work. I see it in my return.horse comics too, they lack the freshness that comes from a dedicated boring meditation on the joke. I need to sit down, maybe with with some reference materials to draw from, and draw until it hurts, then keep drawing (drawing until it hurts is honestly about 2min - I do not draw very often).

Anyway, it took me 5 hours and 56 minutes (thanks to Time Warrior I've actually be tracking it). console window of time logging software

The general idea, and the name, is from feelings I get when I binge eat. A feeling of great emptiness, unquenchable, unthinking,uncontrollable hunger incapable of satiation. I'm exagerating, but I find my feelings often escalate like this - the experience and memory felt like this even though the ordeal was really only half a block of chocolate, an icecream and 2 grilled cheese sandwhiches.

I don't want to do a flat out zine about binge eating though, I don't like that forced, fable feeling when someone tries to make point through thinly veiled metaphor. JRR Tolkein puts it well.

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

I want to note, I don't intend to have any applicability in this story. I just want to capture the feeling of a wanting pit and a character fruitlessly filling it;

The first idea was for a whole village of characters, throwing things into a pit. I jumped straight into VR, and did a few drawings but lost the screenshots.

I wasn't super happy with the VR stuff, and it didn't feel inspiring, so I went to the whiteboard and drew some circles as points of departure for cartoon figures. I've been very inspired by both Peanuts and the Simpsons lately, I like the idea of character driven stories with simple shape designs. A round pig quickly emerged, which I thought looked funny, and I jumped back into VR to see if I couldn't put the pig into it there.

Three gray images - 1: a grey scale cartoon of a black hole in the ground with grey shapes emerging, a wee snowman like figure, and text scrawled over it reads "what can't I put in?". 2: A pig, a man, and a wee snowman like figure stand in a row with fish like shapes behind them. 3: Three copies of the pig character at different rotations stand around a hole, inside the hole you can see the face of a fourth pig

I mucked around for a while finding a good way to dither them, eventually settled on Didder. I had trouble installing it with Homebrew, but seeing as it's written in go I realised I could just fork the repo and build it locally.

Three dithered images - 1: a grey scale cartoon of a black hole in the ground with grey shapes emerging, a wee snowman like figure, and text scrawled over it reads "what can't I put in?". 2: A pig, a man, and a wee snowman like figure stand in a row with fish like shapes behind them. 3: Three copies of the pig character at different rotations stand around a hole, inside the hole you can see the face of a fourth pig

I wasn't super happy with the VR stuff, and it didn't feel inspiring, so I went to my sketchbook and tried drawing and ideating there while watching Babylon Berlin with Luke. I wanted the story to come together in a way that was fun and and felt true to the feeling I want in the premise. A zine where every page has a big hole on it sounded really boring, like a weak formal exercise in lieu of something actually funny.

Afterwards I went back to my room and kept on trying to bring it together. I did some epncil sketching paper and did some more whiteboard drawing too. I googled "sinkhole" for inspiration, and thought about what I found most fun to draw and create. I looked at some of my favourite comic artists:

(yes, a lot of adventure time alumni)

I also couldn't help thinking about Richard Scarry, a monumental inspiration who pioneered personified pigs.

I think what I find most funny right now, for this zine, is: A pig finds a sinkhole and sets about approaching this absence the way it usually approached absence in it's life - filling it with apples. I could draw the pig dealing with the logisitics of apple transport, and sourcing larger and larger apples. With each panel the pig could espouse ideas about vacancy and space, about apples and a relationship with need. This can let it be non linear too, which makes good for a no-cut zine, and allows for self contained silly jokes.

The next step is to actualy draw them out, and draft the text. I don't think I'll do VR for this, there's nothing I can do currently in VR that will make this idea any more interesting, and the drawings will be a lot funnier with-out the perspective issues. I would still like to do another bike-tricks-like zine, and I think the dithering has some promise - perhaps something for "All Saints All the Time"? Which is the name/prompt I've given myself for the Hallozeen I'll do for Hallozeen fest.

Here's the drawings so far: Whiteboard drawings with a pig, some sketches of sinkholes, and the pig pushing a wheelbarrow of lumps into a hole sketchy pen drawings in a notebook of a pig with it's trotters on it's hips(?) and other poses, holding apples, driving a digger, yelling sketchy drawings of a pig throwing apples in a hole

If I think about what I wish I'd done most with Seeking Resonance over Distance, it's mostly that I wish I finished it faster and that I had hand lettered from the start, so that's what I'll do now. Finishing it faster is the real challenge. I've been enjoying drawing on the white board, I think I might try drawing this zine on the white board, encouraging speed. At least, that should be enough for the draft this sunday.

to wrap up, here's bullet points for the idea and motivation

what else

listening to

Big Thief

questions