Upstreem Retrospective and Notebook Tour (Patreon)

Something different! Let's take a guided, chronological tour through my writing notebook for Upstreem. It's been a long time since I dipped into talking about the writing process, even though it's a huge part of the process of making comics.

Part of that is because it feels like cheating to talk about the "intention" of writing, like I'll just be dictating to you what the story is about instead of letting you read it for yourself. But, uh... oh well! It'll double as an opportunity to talk about this chapter that took me a very long time to make. You'll have to read my handwriting to make sense of a lot of it anyway.

The Initial Outline

 The first image here is the very first bit of writing I have in my notebook for Upstreem, though I must have scribbled an outline somewhere else first given how relatively coherent and similar to the final product it looks (I know for a fact that in the most preliminary plans, Kay did, in fact, fall into the toilet as the inciting incident). Regardless, this was the state of the outline before I started writing any dialogue or drawing anything.

I've laid it out next to clips from the finished product just to like, demonstrate the beats that were laid down. You might notice that the beginning is a lot more clear than the middle and end-- that tends to happen.

I'm not going to catalogue every single one, but a lot of my notebook writing has little doodles in the margins to make it clear if I'm picturing a specific visual. It's often a character's expression, but sometimes, like here, it's just the composition of a panel.

These two pages are a pretty good representative sample of what this notebook is like to flip through. There's a loose, sloppy script, and a set of thumbnails for pages from while earlier in the story (they're basically always out of sync). These pages include a scene that got entirely cut, which you can see being foretold by the giant note that says CONDENSE, which I leave on a lot of pages. I tend to write too much dialogue, including a lot of stuff that isn't funny and doesn't mean anything, and then cut it down to something that feels punchy to me-- comics is a medium where being concise is a big deal.

 You can also see me realizing that the planet this story takes place on doesn't have a name.

Let's do that thing where I make the implicit explicit (sorry!). Upstreem is a story that uses diving into the ocean metaphorically as a symbol for diving introspectively into oneself (This is an original idea that nobody else has ever had; if you use the dark depths of the ocean as a metaphor for the dark depths of a person, I'm suing). To be clear it's also a story about funny fish, but I hope you grant me a little bit of trust that I do stuff on purpose sometimes.

I started writing this scene with dialogue, and very quickly realized that it just didn't work for me. Kay is a character who lives on the surface, and exploring what's hiding under that surface is something she actively avoids-- from my perspective, this is her defining character trait. She shouldn't have words for the things that happen in the deep. It felt like I was undercutting myself; trying to put my protagonist in a dark, moody, introspective place while also allowing her to continue being chatty and sarcastic and deflecting her involvement.

Making that change immediately changed the tenor of this scene for me, and the fact that this page doesn't end with any real kind of joke feels like an important tone setter to me. I'm hoping that her presence as a character in this chapter is stronger without dialogue, even if it means the main character of my comic didn't speak for like two years, sorry

Upstreem is structured as a trip through several ascending layers-- blue collar labor, white collar labor, owners-- you get it. By the time I had gotten to the second level of the company, I realized this story was already running long, and I started trying to ration out the remaining pages to the remaining levels of the company. I was aiming for 32 pages, then I pushed it to 36, and eventually I finally settled on 42.

 Sometimes I slip back and forth between outline style writing and dialogue writing, depending on how blurry or clear a scene is in my mind. You can (maybe) see that I'm just blazing through this scene on my first go without writing a single word of dialogue.

The part I'm extra interest in is this--

Fairfax Carter is... referenced? Present? Idk. Him being present is fun if we get to see animosity between them in real time. Maybe not outright hostility-- he's a quiet boy.

So, to let you in on a secret, Trouty Fishlips and Fairfax-Carter Fishlips are two of the oldest-planned characters in this comic. Most characters you end up seeing in the comic are invented for the sake of the story you're seeing; Scrabatha exists because somebody needed to show up and try to buy junk in order for "The Third One" to happen. That cop in "Do Not Fine" exists because I wanted to do a courtroom story and I needed somebody to be on the other side of that conflict. This is the case for TONS of characters in this episode-- Anchonin and Gutrie did not have names until I needed them to have names for the sake of dialogue. They're the type of characters who are named things like "Guy" or "Boss" in the script.

By contrast, the idea of "There's a callous evil 'good old boy' businessman and his name is Trouty Fishlips" is way older than the comic itself. So is the idea that he has an insufferable gamer son who clearly hates him. Also I think so is the name "Fairfax Carter". Even the designs are pretty similar to the way I drew them in high school. "Upstreem" did not spawn Trouty Fishlips and Fairfax Carter; Trouty Fishlips and Fairfax Carter are the seed around which "Upstreem" was built.

Anyway, you'll also notice I've described the hostility between them as "quiet" and "not outright" which is kind of funny in retrospect.

Speaking of randos who are made up on the spot and then given names for the sake of dialogue, do you remember who Kevin is?? He's the boss of the shipping employees who gets on their case about not working for like a minute. Anyway, here's the implicit being made explicit again.

Two instances here where I'm mostly highlight the absence of something in the notebook. In this draft, Fairfax doesn't get angry, and the ship doesn't explode its thruster one final time.

Also, the cop joke that I immediately crossed out and replaced.

 And finally-- the very last piece of Upstreem that I wrote was that angry rant from Fairfax. This was an invention on the spot while drawing the boardroom scene.

The idea that Kay hated Fairfax enough to steal his bag was important to me, and it was important to the literal mechanics of the scene, but like, I needed to understand what was going on in her head a little better. After a little bit of grasping, I got to this--

Kay is the avatar of ironic detachment. Fairfax represents authority, sure, but it must be more. Maybe it's the easy nature of his life -- he's massively rich, and massively spoiled. He's a kid. But not one who initially looks like he's constrained by the power dynamics that come with that.

This explanation is kinda incomplete, but, it's what made me realize that Fairfax couldn't be quiet-- he needed to be loud, and he needed to be a voice for the things that were being left unsaid. Giving him this moment of catharsis allows him to look, for a small moment, like an ally to Kay in a frightening and rigidly defined world, before he instantly reproduces the same arbitrary cruelty back onto her. I like it, I like this scene, I like Fairfax Carter. He's on like three pages.

Hopefully I didn't completely ruin the magic by explaining my thoughts about my own work? It still feels kinda silly-- read it yourself, don't rely on me to tell you what's true about it! But, y'know, if you were curious what i thought about it-- I like it! :-)