After posting all three chapters here on the blog, I’ve given Shouting at the Void its own page for those of you who’d like to read the whole thing in one sitting. Go check it out!
Now that it’s over and I’ve had some time to relax and get away from it, I want to sit down and collect my thoughts on the comic. It certainly wasn’t anything like last year’s October Game. I had a few pieces in mind then, but spent most of last October frantically scrambling to do something, anything, and it led to a lot of interesting choices and a good variety of work. On the other hand, Shouting at the Void was planned out more than a month in advance, everything written and laid out and with the basic look of the comic nailed down before drawing a single page. Last minute changes were frequently made, sure, but overall I had a much easier time, never stressing nearly as much as I had done last year.

The decision to draw everything on small 6x9 inch paper was largely a time consideration. Unlike last year, I wanted to be able to keep working consistently on Other Sleep while doing this. I knew it was possible, having seen online that Moritat’s pages for Elephant Men, the Spirit, and All-Star Western were drawn just a little bit smaller, 8.5x5.5, two pages crammed onto one sheet of typing paper, basically. Within the first week, though, it was made clear that I couldn’t quite do what I was wanting to do. Stubborn as I am, I stuck with my decision to work with this paper and I think I eventually got the hang of it. Will I ever do it again, though? Eh, no, probably not. Even with everything planned in advance, I quickly realized I still had maybe a bit too much going on with the plot, and a simpler story with plenty of big panels for breathing room probably would have worked better. That’s something I’ve fought with in plenty of other comics, maybe I’ll eventually have it nailed down.

There were two big inspirations for the comic. The first was Philip K. Dick. I was just finishing reading Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said when I came up with the idea. As many of his novels as I’ve read, I always think most about Dick’s short story, the Electric Ant, about a person who finds out after a terrible accident that he’s not human at all, but a robot. And of course Rachel in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, who doesn’t know she’s a replicant until Deckard gives her the Voight-Kampff test. There’s something that really appeals to me about that, finding out that you’re something you’re not, but for the comic, I kind of wanted to invert that, with Mint the android becoming human. Or maybe finding out that he’s been human all along and didn’t realize it. 

The second big influence was Seijun Suzuki. Shortly after getting that basic idea of a robot turning existential and human, I watched three of his crime movies in a row and got inspired to do something similar. Mint’s suit, that light blue which informed the rest of the visual look of the comic, is taken almost directly from Tetsu’s outfit at the end of Tokyo Drifter. I had drawn that Daft Punk inspired android assassin a month or two before, but Suzuki’s films were what drove me to take it further. The way those movies are paced informed how I wrote the comic too, especially the latter half of chapter two, where each page is a new, different scene, with some of the connective tissue ripped out. I never showed characters traveling from location to location or whatever, I just jumped from scene to scene as a way of translating to comics the kind of fractured narratives Suzuki was known for. Did it work? I think so, maybe. It was another way of cramming more into the 30 page limit, rather than, I don’t know, simplifying the story, which could have possibly been a smarter choice.

Other things that seeped into the creation of this comic: Battle Angel Alita, Machine Man, some Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma, probably some other stuff. Of course there’s a ton of tokusatsu in the android designs. And Nothing? A character who emerges from a portal in the desert, whose intentions are never made clear? He was inspired directly by Welcome to Night Vale.

I’m a little disappointed in how I handled Ester. She had more going on originally, but that stuff got cut for space, as did the final showdown with Nothing. The 30 page limit sucked in those regards…

Despite being easier than last year’s desperate groping for ideas, I kind of missed that chaos this year. I missed being able to just do whatever, draw however I liked rather than striving for a more consistent, unified look. The constraints I laid down for myself started to get a little stifling, and it didn’t help that my only real escape from it was to work on Other Sleep, which had its own rules to follow. Between the two, I didn’t really have time to do much else, and I was really starting to get burned out by the end there. I’m not sure how well it shows in Shouting at the Void, but some of the pages of Other Sleep that I drew during this last month definitely suffered for it. Note to self: don’t take on two big comics projects like this at once.

All that said, it was still fun and I’m proud of the work I did. There’s nothing else like it, which may be why hardly anybody seems to have bothered reading it even though I was posting the pages everywhere. And I definitely want to do more existential android hitman comics somewhere down the road, make it a genre into itself.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed drawing it. Thanks for checking it out!