Annotated 32-14
So user TheWreck suggested “A workplace comedy – but it’s in an unconventional workplace,” and that just so happens to describe the most developed series that I never published, Bounds and Grounds. The setting was a bookstore loosely analogous to Barnes and Noble, with similar divisions and categories and the same bewildering immensity. I’ve done some work in school libraries, and bookstores always struck me as this wondrous, fascinating place to work in: both antisocial and very, very social. Plus, I was influenced by two of my contemporaries: Unshelved,set in a library, and Between Failures, set in a somewhat ambiguous but seemingly cozier bookstore.
Like the latter series, B&G was also set to be a romcom, with a cast of characters designed to bounce off each other: Brad the lovable shelver with a body of concrete (who now strikes me as an echo of Questionable Content‘s Elliot), Shonda the overworked manager on the edge of an early midlife crisis, the intense Craig and personable Tracy in customer service, Eliot the pretentious intellectual who basically lives in the bookstore, and Gordon, the one who usually gets called to help a patron find that one book with the blue cover. Plus a constant influx of other customers. Racial diversity and LGBTQ representation was strong (and I figured I’d add IA to that with a little more time).
All the echoes of other comics here might strike you as a weakness or a strength. I was planning a few devices that would set the series apart: putting book jacket designs in amongst the panels, some sesquipedalian dialogue for Eliot, and a set of strangely rendered hallucinations for Shonda. Essentially, it would’ve been about finding love in a world where you have both access to seemingly infinite knowledge and a job that seems to demand to be treated like a cult membership.
The first story I came up with, “The Man in the Red Hat” (in which one of our characters discloses some unexpected political beliefs), had to be scrapped when the 2016 election did not go the way I was counting on, and the project’s momentum never really recovered. In those dark months afterward, I could barely muster enough positivity to keep my wife and myself going, much less a bunch of lovesick and/or hornt goofballs. Maybe if things had been a bit further along, I could’ve built a feedback loop of romantic energy to pour back and forth from the project and my life, but as it was, I just didn’t have it in me. Maybe someday I’ll come back to this, though the way the book market looks sometimes, it might be more of a period piece than a riff on current events.
“som unxpe”?
Hoo boy, was I tired when I typed that. Corrected.
Yesterday I got thinking about how the new, improved Nancy is being done by “Olivia Jaimes,” a pseudonymous cartoonist said to be a webcomics veteran; which caused me to idly wonder how other webcomics veterans would have revamped Nancy. Alas, my ability to ape other artists’ styles is… limited, but that’s something the Waltrips have always excelled at; and, likewise, you’ve always been able to write effectively in other playgrounds.
So there you have it: The single most useless webcomic project idea of all time. I’m not even going to try to come up with a worse idea than that.
But, by God, Fredrin/Piro’s Nancy would have been a sight to shake the very heavens
Thanks, Ray! :-D
Between Failures isn’t set in a bookstore, it’s set in a store that happens to sell books among other things, and in any case the events depicted in the comic have mostly drifted away (both thematically and physically) from that setting.
Also, Between Failures really isn’t a romcom. Sure, it has romance and it has comedy, and early on it even had a plotline that might be considered a variant of the stereotypical romcom plot, but (just as one example) about a year ago it spent several months on a storyline that involved the discovery of a decades-old mummified corpse of a man who had overdosed on painkillers and alcohol after his son had been kille din an accident.
Well, you’re right that it’s drifted, but the characters call it a bookstore and I’d say the relationship stuff is still enough of a factor that it feels more like a romcom than anything else.
I’m not sure why Gravedust is surprised; you’d think he’d know by now that Frigg is a woman of prodigious appetites.
Yeah, I mean, he’s literally been in her head.
Gravedust: “Wait, they have cashews?!?”