You Can Always Restart
Ahoy hoy!
I've mentioned a few times over the past couple of weeks (mostly in the "What I enjoyed" section) that I've been reading David M. Willis' Dumbing of Age. I'm all caught up on over a decade of webcomics! Woo! There are a lot of reasons that I like it. I find the characters compelling. I'm a big sucker for slice-of-life type stuff that occasionally gets spicy and that tracks multiple groups of folks all just kinda living their lives and the ways they intersect with comedic and dramatic effect. Lots of Beast Wars references and acknowledgement of how great IDW TF comics are (and the occasional nod to TMNT and Sonic and stuff too). A cartoonist with the initials DMW when I'm DWM. It's great!
But now that I am somehow caught up, I've also decided to check out their earlier comics. I've just finished the original run of Roomies! now. Roomies is a proto-Dumbing of Age in a lot of ways and that's a big part of what has inspired this week's blog about revisiting and revising your old work.
You Can (Always) Redo
Yes, that is a riff on the Rebuild of Evangelion titles which are also a pretty good example of what I'm talking about today.
Sometimes, as a creator, you have a good idea. Sometimes, you have a great idea. And sometimes, you do not have the ability to properly execute your big idea. There are a million reasons for it, right?
Just to look at Evangelion. The original TV series, somewhat infamously, always had a very small staff working on it, was running up against tight deadlines the entire run of the production, had various curveballs thrown at it by both the creator and the studio that would significantly change the overall plot and focus of individual episodes while in production, and ends in a couple of really weird episodes that may or may not have had budget problems and/or time problems of being created in a major crunch. The last couple episodes weren't too well received, and so the ending got rewritten in a pair of films. And then a few years later, Hideaki Anno and Gainax decided to do the whole thing again over almost 15 years with the Rebuild movies.Plus manga and light novel adaptations/reimaginings. Plus this that and the other thing (not to mention Anno's Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and Shin Kamen Rider, which are a similar, but different thing).
All of these versions tackle the same basic material, but due to different sized budgets and teams and Anno's shifting interests and feelings as a person, they can get pretty different. One of the things I really like about it is seeing how each iteration and even just escalations within each version feel like they're usually trending toward something truer to who Anno is at the moment of creation (even if I think most of the endings are bad).
If you have an idea you like, roll with it. Chances are, you've got something, otherwise why would you be interested in the first place. But in recognizing your limitations--be they budget or time or skill or editorial interference or whatever--know that you can also keep an idea in your back pocket to try it again, but better.
The Walkyverse
If you haven't taken the time to read all of Willis' webcomics, that's probably fine. They've been at it for like 25 years at this point, so it's a lot to catch up on. The long and short is there was an initial series: Roomies! about college roommates. That ended and some plotlines were refocused/retconned into a new series, It's Walky! That then spun-off into two other series: Joyce and Walky! and Shortpacked! And a ways into all of this, David looped back around to the initial concept of a story about college freshmen trying to acclimate to their new circumstances (and being semi-autobiographic, but now with the clarity of hindsight) and started Dumbing of Age. Most of the cast are folks from the various previous series, but reimagined and tweaked to fit the college plot. Some personality traits remain pretty true. Some ideas that just got touched on waaaaaaaay back in Roomies! are refined and actually executed deftly.
There aren't a lot of ideas I had when I was young that I revisit and see if I can't make work better now with my expertise and skills, but there are definitely some things that I've poked at here and there. And for some of my more recent ideas, there've been lots of things I've revisited. Sometimes it's a concept that I feel like I'm getting to the 95 yard line on but can't quite get across to the goal, and so I see if I can't run a different play and break it. Sometimes it's a particular script that I look at and even if it is recent, I feel isn't terribly representative of how I write. But when I go through these things, I always try to make it a new doc so I can still go back to the old and see just how and what I've refined that might make it's way back or that might make itself into yet another revision.
I think there's sometimes an assumption that live performance is the only medium in which you get a different variation of a work every time. But you can absolutely revisit your older comics works and ideas and find some new angle on them or reason to bring back something that never quite clicked when you did it in the past.
Wrap It Up
In some ways, you can even do this in licensed or corporate comics. Brian Cronin has a fun series over at CBR called Wrap it Up! Each entry looks at two comic series wherein the plotline of one series ultimately had to be resolved in another. I think the most recent--at time of writing--was about Adam Warlock's series getting canceled and some of those plots getting resolved in Hulk. I bring this up because while obviously starting from scratch is an option, sometimes you'll be given a chance to finish your story in another way: be it a different series or a one-shot or OGN. I've even occasionally seen stories more-or-less wrapped up across universes by using similar characters (I swear one of the Wrap it Ups is about a Namor story that gets "resolved" in Aquaman because it was easier to do a light retelling and then resolve the story there than it was to get new Namor stuff going at Marvel).
A good idea shouldn't go to waste, and there's often going to be some way to circle back around to it. It's just a matter of keeping those ideas in sight so they don't get lost.
And, as an extra little note: I have said before, when I'm scripting, I tend to practice bad habits. I do a lot of one-and-dones where I take a single pass and then have someone else read it and only make revisions after I've had someone else do a pass. I also do a lot of batch scripting with rewrites--which is where I will write say the first 5-10 pages of the script, leave it for a bit, plot out the back half, reread that first section and do my first round of rewrites, then finish the script having sometimes almost completely rewritten the first batch of pages. Unless something is actually egregious, I tend to believe you shouldn't revise until you've finished a draft and can see the thing in it's entirely. And, no, you probably shouldn't just get stuck revisiting and rewriting the same script or redrawing the same page again and again until you get it right. But maybe down the line, you'll get the chance to truly do it all over again, the way that reflects you now.
What I enjoyed this week:
Blank Check (Podcast), Craig of the Creek (Cartoon), Honkai Star Rail (Video game), My Adventures with Superman (Cartoon), The Broken Room by Peter Clines (Book), Crime Scene Kitchen (TV show), Dumbing of Age (Webcomic), Solve This Murder (Podcast), Cruel Summer (TV show), Praise Petey (Cartoon), The Loveliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen (Album), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (Movie).
New Releases this week (8/2/2023):
Nothing from me!
New Releases next week (8/9/2023):
Nothing from me! Couple of slow weeks, but lots coming up the pipeline!
Announcements:
I've mentioned it a couple of times, but I'm largely done with the con circuit for the year. There might be a thing in a couple of weeks, and if so, I'll be letting folks know ASAP! We're not going to be at Tucson Comic-Con this year. Love that show, but just didn't work out right. And at the moment of writing, I don't think I'll be at NYCC.
This is kind of a soft announcement following them mentioning it on their Twitch stream, but Becca and I are working on a comic. We're co-plotting, I'm scripting, they're drawing, and their friend Duke who has lettered a bunch of their smutty stuff is on-board when we get to that part of things. If you're curious to learn more...
...Maybe join my Patreon! You get to see developmental stuff from this, and other work-in-progress projects. Plus this same blog, but without the part plugging my Patreon! And even more extra stuff! ORRRRR... join Becca's Patreon because they're also going to be sharing some of this comic developmental stuff!
Pic of the Week:
The neighbor's cat was chillin in our complex's courtyard and I managed to sneak some pets. The kitty is pretty nice, but often doesn't let people approach, so it was a nice treat. Or maybe it was the kitty's way of apologizing for frequently coming and hanging out on our landing and driving my cats wild.
