CIVIL CITY: the history of my first webcomic (Patreon)

Civil City was my first webcomic, but it wasn’t my first comic. Chronologically, my first time making comics occurred prior to my last time wetting the bed. Imagine a tiny goblin stapling pieces of paper together, then drawing a comic, hoping there was enough pages to contain it. (Normally not a problem, since I tended not to finish projects. This will be a recurring theme.)

Growing up, my exposure to comics mostly took the form of Garfield collections or random Spider-Man issues pulled from collectible store longboxes. Eventually I discovered manga, and I realized the potential of long-form comics that could be read from start to finish (provided I had enough time to flip through the volumes at Borders). By the time I was a depressed, pimple-faced high school student, I’d discovered webcomics. It started with the Beartato comics I found on Livejournal, which led to Dr. McNinja, which led to Bad Machinery and Gunnerkrigg Court and a million other things. All very different types of comics, which managed to coexist in this weird ethereal space.

I figured if I ever started a webcomic of my own, it’d be a series of single-page gag strips, but that never ended up happening. I was too enamored with the idea of a long, story-driven comic. It wasn’t until I graduated high school that I realized, hey, why don’t I just do the dang thing?

Like I said, I’d been making comics my entire childhood, so I already had a bunch of weird characters in the back of my head. My initial concept was to take those old characters, mostly superheroes, and re-purpose them into a new story. My character who could fly, brilliantly called Flight Man, became Ethan, a sarcastic jerk who loved to heckle authority figures (basically proto-McBell). Freeze Dude, my teen skateboarder superhero with ice powers, became Joshua “Colonel Cold” Stone, a depressed adult with ice powers. My Power Rangers knock-off, the Mega Morphers, became the Sentry Scouts, whose unfortunate initials were never addressed during the comic’s run.

I had just started community college, so I went ahead and made that the story’s setting. (If art school had been financially viable, it might have been a different comic entirely.) I posted the first page to tumblr on Christmas Eve, 2012:

I didn’t have any scripts written for future pages. I also didn’t have an outline, or any idea how long the comic would be. Here’s a tip for the kiddos: sometimes it’s more about the journey than the destination, but if you don’t know what the destination is, there’s a good chance you’ll run out of gas before you find it.

Civil City had tone problems, to say the least. I wanted it to be funny, but I also wanted tension and dramatic payoff. It’s a balance I’m still learning to do, but I think I’ve gotten better since 2012. Clown Corps, while not perfect, knows what kind of story it is. Civil City had no idea. To this day it’s the only comic of mine to contain nudity and the word “fuck,” and too much of the humor was failed 30 Rock-style jokes about race and sexual orientation. (Ruh-roh!) While the story sometimes felt adult, it also felt immature, like it was written by a child with only a vague idea of how stories work. Because it was!

The premise of the story was that more than half of the population had superpowers, so there was plenty of superheroes to go around, and most folks with powers could just chill. It removed the “great responsibility” from the great power equation, and the line between hero and civilian was blurred. So the story had some cool superhero stuff, but was largely slice-of-life. Perhaps not a terrible idea for a comic, but eighteen-year-old me just didn’t have the tools to pull it off.

In the first chapter, Ethan meets Dawn, a chipper extrovert who tries to befriend him. The Fuchsia to Ethan’s McBell. (I swear I can write different kinds of characters.) Ethan could fly, and Dawn had weak telekinetic abilities. I didn’t have much of a reason for this at the time, but here’s how I interpret it in hindsight: Ethan has a cool superpower, and no friends. Dawn has a weak superpower, but she’s powerful socially. Ethan might have an upper-hand in the action side of the story, but in the slice-of-life side, he’s the weak one. (Did this have anything to do with my real-life inability to make friends and my desire to be socially competent? Who’s to say.)

If I’d picked one or two main characters for the whole story, it may have had some focus. But I decided my very first webcomic should have an ensemble cast. Brilliant. He’s a quick rundown of some of the characters and their storylines.

Ethan: He’s generally unmotivated, apart from his strong desire to leave his hometown. He’s completely indifferent to the superhero organizations who scout him for his power. He basically sleepwalks through the story, watching the people around him achieve his dream without him.

Dawn: Initially a supportive figure to the rest of the cast, the story slowly reveals her insecurities. Past trauma seems to be the reason her telekinesis is so weak, but she tries to get past it so she can help people in more concrete ways. She eventually joins the Sentry Scouts, an organization made up mostly of non-powered superheroes.

Josh Stone: The Colonel is a competent superhero, and also a sad sack who doesn’t get invited to parties. His marriage sucks. The comic eventually shows him getting divorced and moving to Alaska, where he gets a fulfilling job, a group of friends, a romantic partner who actually likes him. (The story would have eventually led him back home, but lucky for him, I never finished writing it. Live in eternal peace, Colonel. You earned it.)

Roy Frost: Aka Ossifo, a superhero whose loyalty to his secretly evil boss gets tested after the evilness stops being a secret. They were gonna do a whole fight scene where I got to draw my community college getting completely wrecked. It would’ve been dope, probably.

Devon: She had planned to go to a big city college, but stayed home to take care of her siblings. She has a fling with Ethan, but he’s too busy sleepwalkin’ to maintain a close relationship. After her mom remarries and there’s more help around the house, Devon decides to follow her big city dreams after all. Later, scrubs!

Brian Hung: A real weirdo. I’d dropped hints, but never got around to revealing that his superpower was immortality.

Other characters include Tracy/Terajoule, a hero with an undercut, because I designed her in 2013; Maria, a little girl trapped in a robot body; Franklin, a young robotics expert whose mental health issues were not written as delicately as they should've been; Ignatius, a gay ninja who briefly works with Dawn at a froyo shop; and the Golden Goose, the story’s true villain (not to be confused with Captain Duckface, a completely different character).

Let’s talk about the art for a minute. This was before I started making all my comics digitally, and let me just say: I can never go back to not being able to resize a character’s head, ‘cause I will never get it right on the first try. Anyway, the first couple pages of Civil City were done with microns on cardstock. Then I tried inking with a brush for the very first time, and I was bad at it, but it was fun! Then I got bored and switched back to microns. This was the start of a tradition where I constantly switch back and forth between thin and thick lineart during a comic’s run. It’s already happened a few times with Clown Corps.

The art in Civil City is bad. I always say my art is bad, but some of this stuff is indefensible. Here’s the thing, though: making lots of comics means drawing a lot of drawings. If I hadn’t drawn Civil City, Protectors would have looked worse than it does, and if I hadn’t drawn Protectors, Clown Corps would look like Civil City. If my next comic looks even a little good, it’ll be because of all the hours spent drawing clowns. Another tip for the kiddos: make a few webcomics. I may not the biggest fan of my art, but even I can tell I've improved.

Now, like I said, I didn’t have an outline going into Civil City. But at some point, I must have learned that one of the most satisfying things a story can do is end. Because I did, in fact, have an ending planned. And now I’m going to spoil it.

The last page I drew (circa 2017) featured Tracy getting attacked by Franklin’s robots:

Franklin confesses the assassination attempt was ordered by the Beard, the leader of the Super Squadron. The Beard's plan is to take out a few heroes to prove the world is still dangerous, so his organization won't lose funding. Tracy brings the info to Roy, who’ s in denial about it, but he eventually confronts his boss. That’s when the big college-wreckin’ fight happens.

Meanwhile, Ethan has flown all the way to Alaska to heckle/check up on the Colonel, while Dawn has left town to establish herself in the Sentry Scouts.

The Golden Goose shows up at the community college, probably whistling. He activates his super villain doomsday device, a city-wide ray that erases everyone’s superpowers. Roy and the Beard’s fight abruptly ends. The Golden Goose kicks both of their asses, revealing that he doesn’t have powers, he just does a lot of crunches or whatever. He probably had a motive for all this, idk I can’t find my notes.

News of the chaos reaches the Colonel, who was far out of range of the anti-power ray. He’d like to go back to his hometown and help, but he wouldn’t be able to get there in time. Ethan reveals a secret he’s been holding onto the entire story: he can fly extremely fast. Like, bonkers fast. In the Colonel’s stead, he zooms back home to kick the Goose's ass.

What we’re left with is a vulnerable city without superheroes, and Ethan and Dawn now have to take an active role in protecting it. The Colonel returns to help out, and his girlfriend comes with him, so that’s nice. Dawn is basically the leader of the new local chapter of the Sentry Scouts. Roy and Tracy and a bunch of other characters make peace with losing their powers and becoming true civilians. Ethan no longer feels trapped in his hometown, ‘cause it turns out he just needed to feel needed. Roll credits.

My biggest problem with this ending is honestly all the cool superhero stuff (which is usually my bread and butter). In a story about a guy who’s physically powerful but emotionally unavailable, an ending where he just becomes even more physically powerful isn’t very satisfying. He would've been shown to be more socially capable in the epilogue, but wouldn’t that hit harder if it was tied to the main conflict and climax of the story? We will literally never know.

I started working on Civil City in 2012, when the first Avengers movie came out and my brain was all silly about superheroes. I wanted to tell a superhero story with an emotional core, but I didn’t really have anything to say. The comic wasn’t good enough to show the public, but if I hadn’t made it a webcomic with an update schedule, I never would’ve drawn so many pages. Although there’s some regrettable content, I don’t regret making the comic. When you’re learning to skateboard, every time you bail brings you closer to landing that kickflip down the 5. No, I cannot think of a non-skateboard metaphor.

Sometime during Civil City’s run, I posted a 40-page one shot called Protectors: Entry Point. Later I wrote a sequel, and soon Protectors overshadowed Civil City, running for hundreds of pages. I can dunk on that comic just as hard, in an even longer post.