Actual Witch Society - State of the Coven Mega-Update (Patreon)

Happy Halloween!

Remember my witch comic? My comic about witches? If you don’t… go check out the stuff I already posted way back when! 

If you do… you might have wondered where that project is at! I haven’t really been talking about it in a long time, so what’s going on with it?

I’ve been pretty focused on Softies for a while, and before that I was focused on my day job for a while… but the witches DO live! And for Halloween, I’m writing a long catch-up post about what they’ve been up to!

STORY

Story is the big fish, and the longest section here. To talk about the story, let’s talk about my philosophy when it comes to approaching Softies vs approaching Witches.

Softies is planned, but it’s intentionally structured as a meandering adventure. I’ve seen the endless linear march of webcomic storytelling crush other, more hardworking artists, so I set up Softies to have an episodic structure, so I’d get to “finish” stories regularly. (This is one of the only smart decisions I made when I was 19).

By using episodic chapters, I can zoom out and think in episode-to-episode terms, but I can also zoom in and think in page-to-page terms.  When I’m thinking about how it’ll be collected into a book, and how it’ll feel to read from cover to cover, I think about it as a series of episodes that fit on the fuzzy path towards the conclusion. When I’m thinking about what needs to happen on a specific page, I think about it as a tight stack of comic pages that hit the story beats of the current episode.

This allows me to create the comic linearly, indefinitely, without needing an airtight script for what’s going to happen in 100 pages, but also without losing the connective thread that you expect when reading a story. It also, IMO, befits a story that’s largely about aimlessness and alienation– it’s a weird comic and a lot of it is about being sad, so wandering is appropriate!

Actual Witch Society is not a webcomic, it’s just a dang comic! It’ll be native to the Graphic Novel medium.  It’s also pretty silly; it’s definitely the lighter of the two projects I’m working on right now, so I’m not as interested in letting it wander around. This one wants to be high-energy and focused. As such, I’m trying to be diligent and approach it as a single tight, funny, 130-ish page story that moves at a steady pace.

So with that established… I have to figure out what happens in it!
The original concept of the Witch comic was a 22 page comic, with basically 5 beats:

• The girls meet

• The girls pluck the sun out of the sky during gym class

• The girls lose the sun

• The girls get the sun back

• The girls return the sun to the sky just in time

I liked the core premise of stealing the sun, and I felt like there was a lot of unexplored story space in these beats– most of them were only, like, a few pages of the 22 page script. It seemed like the most obvious way to stretch the story was to literally stretch it out, over a few days instead of a few hours. Old habits are hard to shake, so I DID end up cracking the story by splitting it into five chapters, called Monday, Tuesday… I’ll let you guess the rest.

I decided early that Tuesday needed to be about Fuchsia and Ingrich being excited about stealing the sun while Molly was paralyzed with guilt and nervousness about it. I like drawing characters being nervous, paranoid, and guilty; it comes more naturally to me than maybe anything else.

Everything else, though, was sort of trial and error. I considered throwing in a detective story for one day, or some sort of half-related anomaly that the girls would have to investigate, but again– trying to keep that focus and forward momentum! I realized that the reason my brain was trying to branch out into different genres or side-stories is because I didn’t want the book to be locked into a single location (the school), so I tried to pull some of the original plot points to new locations. It made sense to relocate the magic ritual to Fuchsia’s home, for example.

What I ended up with– and what I’m currently working with!-- was an outline that looked basically like this:

• MONDAY: The girls meet and steal the sun.
  (Focused on: School, Fuchsia’s house)

• TUESDAY: Fuchsia and Ingrich play, Molly worries.
  (Focused on: School)

• WEDNESDAY: The sun gets lost! Looking for the sun.
  (Focused on: Woods)

• THURSDAY: Stealing back the sun!
  (Focused on: School, night)

• FRIDAY: Returning the sun!
  (Focused on: Athletic Field)

I’m being a little coy, there’s details I’m leaving out, but… I still want you to read the thing and have fun when it’s finished!

My goal is to thumbnail the whole book before I “commit” by starting to draw any individual pages. What does that look like? It looks like this!

The text of these speech bubbles is all in a separate document, but here's a bit of dialogue I like. See if you can match it to the thumbnails above (interactive)

The thumbnails and script here have a symbiotic relationship; sometimes the thumbs inform the script, sometimes vice versa. This is a little unusual for me (Softies is very much script first, thumbnails second) but it has helped me crack some of these scenes faster. Sometimes it helps to let the visuals lead the way and backfill dialogue that makes sense!

MAGIC

This is much less important than cracking the story, but part of the fun of doing a story about magic is that I get to decide how magic works! This is also very hard! I’ve always had an intuitive sense of how I want magic to work in this story, but intuitive senses are squishy and hard to pin down in language that can be communicated to other people.

Some tentpoles for how I want magic to work and be perceived in this world include:

• Tarot and casual zodiac stuff

• Crystal healing

• Computer programming

• Schoolyard rumors about Pokemon

• Kids pretending to be wolves on the playground

• Kids pretending to be wolves on the internet

• That phase a ton of kids have where they get a magic trick prop set

• This seminal Jenny Nicholson video

These tentpoles are crystal (heh) clear in my head, but they don’t exactly naturally congeal into a system of magic. I tried coming up with different like, classes of magic for the girls to specialize in, or different styles, or whatever, but I think even doing that began to feel like I was doing Fantasy Worldbuilding, when my whole goal is to set the story in a mundane world that just happens to have magic in it.

Instead, I tried going backwards– listing out specific things I wanted magic to be able to do, and then defining magic based on its ability to do That Stuff. Here’s that list, because I like it!

• Celestial Summoning
  Plucking a heavenly body out of the sky, right into your hands. These bodies are a fraction of the size they scientifically “should” be, but retain some of their properties regardless. Stars still generate heat and light. They may selectively create microgravital orbits around themselves. 

• Silence Egg
  An egg that’s been pickled in a magical brew overnight. For as long as the egg is intact, it creates a sphere of silence around itself, allowing for stealth. When broken, all the sound it absorbed is released at once in the form of an incoherent yell, sometimes containing the voices of those nearby.

• Glowing Green Fog
  Glowing green fog that arises from certain brews. Has no other remarkable properties, but you can bottle it for a dim lantern.

• Short Circuit Incantation
  A specific series of numbers spoken in an authoritative voice while pointing at an electronic device. The device hears the numbers and short circuits, with tiny little sparks. 

• Yummy Ring
  Ring you can wear that makes food taste, like, marginally better. Supposedly.

• Slime
  Like, the kind you can make on YouTube with flour and water and glue. Its magical property is the joy and happiness it brings to millions as a hobby.  If you post about whether this counts as a potion on the forums your thread will be locked within a day for inciting the most bloody flame war possible.

In the process, I did actually settle on a concept of magic that felt right– in the world of this story, magic is a loose collection of poorly-understood practices, which rely on so many uncontrollable variables that there is almost zero consensus on how it works. The most reliable, consistent property of magic is that it requires ritual, and taking it extremely seriously– this is why our protagonists are good at it.

Once I had this concept in mind, the characters’ “specialties” felt a lot more like natural character elements and less like RPG character classes. Molly became a collector of trinkets that supposedly grant her minor buffs, as a form of neurotic armor against everyday life.  Ingrich became a chaos agent who connects directly with nature but doesn’t have the focus to do it intentionally.  Fuchsia became a brewing and pickling expert who approaches magic enthusiastically, intentionally, and ambitiously.

DESIGN

There’s not as much to report on this front, but what’s reportable is pictures, which is fun! 

 I don't think I ever posted these design concepts for Fuchsia's mom (the glasses didn't make it, sorry!)

Nor these concepts for the UFO Club (who, you'll recall, are the witches' rivals).
Not sure if I'm sticking with the squirrel and chipmunk. The one on the far left is a teacher, the club's sponsor (they're a school sanctioned club, which is what makes them the upper crust compared to the unaffiliated Witch society).

 Finally, the most freeform and aimless designwork on display here but my personal favorite, is this sketchbook page of me trying to find a voice for the World of this book. Because the characters are animals and the setting is pretty anachronistic and fuzzy, I want the world to feel cartoony and characterful and kinda wack, not overly "real life". This is just a sketchbook page of various pieces of furniture that could / would appear in the story! I'm personally a big fan of the boxy teacher desks on the left page and the living room with a big, hefty TV on the right page.

That's all for me from the Witch mines today, but I'll hopefully be back with more as I start thumbnailing and penciling this thing in earnest! :D