'i am not your superstar'

 

So as mentioned, my extraordinary success with finally completing a graphic novel made me go searching for a follow-up and this naturally led me to looking at a few I have embarked on in the past that generally never got far beyond a 'chapter one'. Hilariously, I have at least four others. 

This one from 2006, which for some reason I called I am not your superstar (it's definitely a quote from something, google suggests a Klaus-Kinski-as-jesus quote but I can't imagine that being in my wheelhouse 15 years ago as a quote worth quoting - possibly I was, though, quoting it from someone who quoted it, and I did not realise what the original source was) is actually quite promising, though also problematic. As I mentioned previously, I had two on the go at once in this year, and the main one - which I will henceforth refer to as Cut Snake, though I didn't call it that then, but should have, and I put the two of them in a little comic book which I think had two iterations under two titles but basically the same content. I'll come back to Cut Snake in a future post, and deal with IANYS now. 

As seen from the first page above, it is a story told in retrospect by fans of a short-lived indie group, who incidentally could not have possibly known most of the thoughts or words or even deeds of the people in the group. The group were two boys (Pablo and Domenic) and a girl (Desiree) on drums, the classic line-up, and the girl, Desiree (named I am sure in homage to a stunning girl who played footsies with me under the table in high school while I had absolutely no idea what to do with that, like an idiot, I 'already had a girlfriend'), was desperately in love with Dominic, lead singer/songwriter/guitarist, who was a piece of shit. She does not reveal her love, at least, not in the first chapter and he barely recognises that she exists.  

The scene above is the two boys in the band being driven to a show (via Dixon's) by an acolyte, Val(erie, I assume) who is clearly a complete fuckin' sycophant as well as being big-boned. I am not entirely sure where I was going with all of this, and who I hated most, although I guess I did not hate Desiree, but I was certainly putting her through her paces to the degree she was anything more than a poor little lost soul. Anyway, I can definitely see this story going places. I could make them go on tour, or I could make them always talk about going on tour but never do it. I think at a certain point I would have to get Dominic and Desiree to do it, though. 

Problems/issues I will face working on this one: (1) I will have to redraw the image of Val's car from the outside  - easily the worst drawing in this story, to the degree that I am too embarrassed to show it to you. (2) I will have to give Desiree some more muscle as a character because if all she is is drearily lovelorn that's a shallow rationale for a character, particularly an ostensibly sympathetic one (3) I might even have to make Domenic a slightly more rounded character (even though I, who shouldn't say things like this, find the last two panels above mildly amusing, I feel like Domenic is playing his hand too obviously - although of course the fact that he cares so little about Val's feelings that he can say this kind of thing, is the point - and perhaps he needs a bit of colour). Anyway, this is something I want to keep thinking about, thank you for indulging me.

This is as far as I got in the second part of this story, and I don't know what I was aiming for here... I guess what actually happened was I did these three panels and I ended up thinking, put this aside for a moment and get back to it later! And here I am, back to it later.