#jk if you thought this was an exclusive bc blog you aren't paying attention

[thespiralgrimoire]

Charlotte & Nozel!!

Hey this is like, the first one of these I’ve ever gotten!!

Charlotte: What's something not a lot of people know about you? 

This one is really funny because I will tell you just about anything you want to know about me if you ask but nobody ever asks LOL

But, to be more relevant, I don’t think anyone here knows that I drew a 114-page pokemon comic that I started in middle school and finished in my second year of college, and still produce content for every now and then! It’s the single most successful thing I’ve ever drawn, but faaaaaar from the longest or most expansive. (That would be the 550+ page fantrol comic my sister and I started, but didn’t finish, because we both went off to college.)

Anyway it spanned almost the entirety of my formative years and is extremely close to my heart (naruto comics spanned the rest), and I think that given the fact that I had no idea what the plot even was until page 90, it still holds up pretty well! Far from a masterpiece, but I still consider it a moving piece of art, and certainly a very important reflection of my soul at those ages. The main character was the outlet for a lot of the difficult feelings I was dealing with in middle school and giving her a happy ending was an extremely therapeutic experience for me-- even though I didn’t know it when I was giving her one.

Nozel: What's your greatest accomplishment?

Well, uh.

I GOT FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PAGES INTO A HOMESTUCK FANTROLL COMIC,

and gosh I can’t imagine a single person on this blog wants to hear me talk about Homestuck, but anyone who draws knows just how many fucking pages that is.

That’s not to mention that that’s just the MAIN comic, it doesn’t even touch on the children’s book we (my sister and I) wrote and bound for it, or the mermaid au we also drew and bound, the character sheets, the side comics, the literature, the wiki we started for the extensive world (we created another planet for them and set it up to be semi-canon-compliant), their ancestors, whose stories are all easily as extensive as the main characters and tie into the main plot... Those account for hundreds more pages than the main comic itself.

The story is so incredibly extensive that while we have not worked on the main comic in over three years, we still use pieces of the world or characters daily. It’s become kind of a foundational piece for any other kind of fiction we create. It’s gotten to the point-- and I’m not exaggerating even a little bit here --that every single piece of media I create will inevitably (if it does not initially start out this way) come back to reference or draw from The Fantroll Comic.

I’d actually love to finish it someday, now that we’re both coming out of college and living together again, but there were some issues with the plot that called for some rewriting, and also it’s hard to keep up that type of fervor when there is no larger audience for it than the two people slaving over it side by side.

But aside from the shear magnitude of content we created for it, it also was one of the most useful tools for learning things about stories, comics, collaborative works, and writing. I did a lot of studying of media to make it something I wouldn’t cringe to look at down the line, and guess what? I don’t! It’s still good! It’s a hot mess, but at its core, it’s a good story with good characters and I love it!

I have a feeling this isn’t how you’re supposed to answer these questions.