Q&A 23: short questions
Simon Thomas asks:
What happened to little Claire’s lisp in Wicked Things?
If memory serves, Claire worked on her lisp with speech therapy in her mid teens, but when she gets stressed or tired or distracted, she lisps more. You will see that the more time she spends around Lottie, the more she struggles with it. It's not an exact science. Sometimes readability is paramount. And as Wicked Things was a standalone, I dialled things back.
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Tim asks:
Will Solver only last as long as you don't run out of alterative 'G' names? Will Dean Thompson find redemption? Is he still seeing the bus lady? Is Susan still sawing things off? Is McGraw still making keys? What happened to Ed Gemmell and Neen? What about the Bad Machinery boys? Ryan & Amy? Tim Jones, now that the Reverend has moved in with Shelley? So many more questions!
Yes; I think he already has; they are "just friends"; I don't know; I doubt it; I don't know; all in time; I don't know; he's dead.
I did try to work out a Giant Days sequel, called variously Play House and Fixer Upper. It was profoundly depressing to contemplate and was filed in the bin. Some of the salvageable ideas made it into Solver. To me, if a character's existence continues, it continues on the page and up to that point, it doesn't.
There can only be one true sequel to Giant Days:
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Aaron Eppy asks:
Any chance of seeing the final batch of Steeple issues in a printed edition?
I asked for an up-to-date publisher's statement in order to answer this question. The third Steeple volume, with bookshop distribution through a great publisher, twice as long at the same price as the prior volume, containing some of the career work I am most proud of, including Author Unknown (which is as good as I can write or draw anything due to lockdown-era focus and may never be bettered) has sold fewer copies even than anything I ever self-published. Writing this gives me no pleasure! Given those hard facts, there is absolutely no chance that I will publish a fourth volume. Something about that series just did not stick despite my efforts.
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Paul Hostetler asks:
badmachinery.com and scarygoround.com are both amazing webcomics sites. They're built off of Comicpress, but that fellow looks like he hasn't done an update in over 4 years. Are you doing all your own maintenance and SEO?
He does maintain them if something breaks, but I do sometimes have to ask. It's a precarious situation. Comic Easel is the worst Wordpress comics solution, apart from all the other ones - believe me, I've tried them all. But it works for now and has lots of useful functionality. I've never done any SEO!
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Finally, from Ross Webster:
Do you have a technique for coming up with titles for your stories and storylines? I've always admired how simple yet how well crafted and fitting they all are.
Thank you very much! I've been making up fake titles for media since my mid-teens to amuse myself and others and consider myself an expert titler. To name something is to give it real power.
Comments (19)
Little Days! *chef’s kiss*
For real! It's perfect!
Gutting to hear that about Steeple vol 3. I guess for anything that's not just monster-of-the-week it's pretty much a given that volume 2 of a thing would have lower sales than volume 1 of the thing, and so on.
The poor sales of Steeple Vol. 3 are such a shame, and genuinely baffling given the quality. I'll just be grateful that we got to spend as much time in Tredregyn as we did. And while it would be great if a Volume 4 were viable, I'm minded not to be too compulsive about the "completeness" of the print releases. Getting 100% of your work in print must be a vanishingly rare privilege for webcomic artists, so I treat the print versions as nice-to-have.
It's incredibly dispiriting and demotivating as you can probably imagine. My editor at Dark Horse, Daniel Chabon, is wonderful to work for and has shown a lot of faith in me, so it is doubly disappointing.
Also I will read Little Days with Little Claire any day.
Feel like any future appearances from the Giant Days cast, even if they are in major protagonist roles again, shouldn’t need their original outing to enjoy, in the same way Giant Days itself doesn’t require reading Scary Go Round to understand Esther. This is probably obvious, but I say it cause I feel like a full-on Giant Days follow-up goes against how you usually craft your stories, though I could be wrong about that.
I'm hesitant to describe this series, but it was as much an extrapolation out of Giant Days as Giant Days was from Scary Go Round. Esther, Susan and Daisy weren't in it, or barely were. Like I say, it was fatally flawed.
RIP Tim Jones (1981-2024); Maybe It's For The Better
It was always likely to be either him or the rest of humanity.
Thanks John! These are always a joy to read. I also have a love of fake titles ever since The Simpsons and the sketch comedy show "Mr. Show With Bob and David." (Featuring a pre-Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul Bob Odenkirk). When it comes to titles though I'm always torn between thinking them up and stealing from popular songs and albums.
Mr Show was hard to watch here but a friend had the DVDs and I loved what I saw, and the Netflix reiteration from the 2010s too.
Will we ever find out what happened to Tim?
He exploded into a million pieces.
Thanks, John for the answers! Not gonna lie, Tim *did* kind of deserve it.
He definitely did.
rip Tim... u deserved it
Rest in pieces, a million pieces
I figured that’s why Claire’s lisp in WT was toned down. Also Tim Jones is dead, holy shit.