Hoo boy! It has been quite a while!

The last time I had posted was late August? It’s May now. Almost a full year around the sun has occurred since I last wrote an article. Long enough to have looked at this site more than once and thought, ah yes, the digital equivalent of a roadside attraction long abandoned.

The problem is that once enough time has passed, the act of writing an update begins to feel heavier than the update itself. That one must address the large time-elephant in the room. I had planned on writing a whole article about time’s effect on things, and then on transitions because so many things had happened since I last wrote. I wanted to wax intellectual on a number of subjects. Then I didn’t write them.

I have moved since I last wrote. I had lost a cat since I wrote. Both of those two things contributed to my lack of writing as well. I have gained a cat since I wrote last. So there has been loss, stress. joy, chaos, and so many other smaller underpinnings of life’s advances since I last wrote.

Since change is as good as any segue, that brings us to the crux of the article:

Omega Children has changed form again

That’s right. For anyone who has been following my sporadic ramblings about this project, Omega Children has been many things over the years. Technically the name was attached to a TV show idea I had just after high-school. When LOST was all the rage I wanted to make a Zombie show in the same vein. That idea of dropping someone into the middle of a large event and then giving small tidbits of lore of a particular character each episode. I still think it’s a better idea than The Walking Dead, when that show came out it was similar enough to scrap my idea altogether.

I later came up with a new idea, the current one. It was meant as a series of YA novels. Then, for a long stretch, it became a comic. Now we are back to prose, which is somehow both a major shift and a return to where the idea started.

When it had become about making a comic book is meant learning, truly learning, how to draw. Not in the casual way people say they’re learning how to play the guitar because they know three chords. I mean I had to actually learn how bodies worked, faces, expressions, gesture, and how that forms into visual storytelling.

At first I was using a strange mishmash of methods. I used AI to build a storyboard and trying to figure out poses. Then I tried generating different body positions I could use as wire-frames, which worked about as well as most shortcuts do: useful as allure, unreliable in practice. Then I started using GIMP to stitch together AI generations, reference images, and bits of art I found around google.

It wasn’t elegant nor efficient.

Finally I moved into Clip Studio Pro and found pose-able 3D bodies, which helped tremendously. That was a more stable foundation. I could block out figures, compose panels, and draw over the modes, gradually developing something that felt like an actual workflow instead of an elaborate ransom note made out of other people’s anatomy.

To be fair to myself, I did finish something significant. I finished inking the first issue!

It sounds small but if you have ever attempted to make a comic by yourself. Good god is it a testament to patience. I have the utmost respect for comic author/artists. Doing the whole shebang involves:

Comics are a beautiful medium and also a machine designed to expose every possible weakness in your creative process. You cannot have just a good line of dialogue. You need expression to sell it. You can’t just know where someone is standing; you have to draw the room. Someone can’t just feel trapped; you have to decide whether the panel makes the reader feel trapped.

By the time I had finished the first issue’s inks, roughly two years had passed. Two years. And that first issue was only part of the first arc. The material that would now roughly amount to the first issue… was about one-seventh finished.

One….Seventh…

That’s 1/7 = 0.14285714285… = 14.29%

There is a point in any project where optimism stops being noble and starts being a hostage situation. I could have kept going, technically. I could have kept drawing, inking, and dragging myself into the coloring phase (I got about six pages into that before immense groaning began), grinding one panel at a time until the heat death of the universe began to set in. But I had to be honest with myself:

I do not like drawing enough to make that the central labor of the project. I simply wasn’t enjoying myself anymore.

The practical problem was obvious. At the pace I was going, Omega Children as a comic would take forever. Not “artistically ambitious forever”. Actual forever. The kind of forever wherein the people who started reading the first issue would be handing the final arc to their grandchildren as an inherited burden.

And practicality was not the only issue I was beginning to have. Something was getting lost in translation.

As a comic script, the story had begun to change in ways that were both necessary and frustrating. Comics thrive on external action, visual storytelling, and dialogue. There were many things that required implication. They can convey interiority, but they do so differently. They do it through what is shown, withheld, and sits between panels. That is one of the reasons they’re rad.

The more I worked on Omega Children, though, the more I realized I wanted access to the characters in a different way. I wanted to sit inside their uncertainty. I wanted the narration to linger on how a room feels to them, not just what it looks like. I wanted to describe the strange little mental spirals people have when they are afraid, guilty, hopeful, angry, or trying hard not to become one of those things. I liked getting deep inside of their thoughts and I want a reader to bare witness to those thoughts.

In short: I wanted to write. Not draw. Not storyboard. Write!

So Omega Children is prose again.

And suddenly I started writing again. And it felt so good to be back on that train.

What went from a smattering of comic drafts in various stages and a single inked issue has blown into a Prologue, five chapters, and another on the way. In comic terms that covers about two and a half issues. In one week. That feels really good.

Other random notes, still related to the story

I have updated the Omega Children page so the chart is accurate to the new version of the project. It now reflects the shifts from comic format to novel format. For anyone who has been curious or confused about where things stand, that should make the structure easier to follow.

And barring some new life event deciding to kick open the door, I plan to post the prologue in the near future. Which is exciting… and terrifying.

For a long time The Omega Children has existed as this private, sprawling, and constantly mutating thing. I’ve talked about it, rewritten it, redesigned it, drawn it, abandoned it, revived it, overthought it, and occasionally attacked it verbally until something useful within it fell out.

But now I get to dust off the site, explain where I have been without pretending a neat paragraph can summarize this messy year, and begin pointing toward what comes next.

I was gone longer than intended. The story has changed shape. I’m all good. I’m stoked to be doing all this stuff again.

This writing thing is rad.