![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
serpentinemalignI bought a copy of the Batman: Prey TPB to treat myself! It's one of the more recent editions, published in the UK by Eaglemoss, so I have no idea on the quality but the cover, mirroring the first issue of the original story, is just so gorgeous. It is one of the last major stories of Hugo's that I have yet to collect in physical form, and it's also, I've come to realise, my favourite, so there was a noticeable gap in my collection.
Over the years collecting comics for niche DC blorbos, I've come to realise I am NOT a fan of individual comic issues, which I guess makes things a little easier for me. Single issues feel so fragile and precious and I feel pressure to not damage them in reading because they are so ephemeral and 'temporary' feeling, beyond of course the whole culture behind keeping them in pristine condition. I also just find it a lot harder to read comics in their original form... they get out of order (folders? what are those?), the advertisements are distracting, it's hard to flip to the parts you want in multi issue stories (especially if you are also analysing for meta purposes, which I admit is also why I wanted a copy of this volume in particular - I want to pull apart what makes Prey Hugo so compelling and unique in my eyes).
Obviously in some cases with TPBs that have bad print quality or reproduction, it's worth getting the original comics instead, but I love collected volumes simply for their convenience, and I hadn't heard any bad news about the Eaglemoss Batman reprints, so I took the plunge ❤️ I can't wait to gently caress physical art of Hugo's weird dollfucker self with his smoking jacket and gloriously tacky cocaine decor penthouse. The story and art is such a product of the transition into the edgy 90s and yet it has grown on me so much, perhaps simply because the Hugo portions were made to personally attack me and give me the good kind of psychic damage.
I started coding new stuff for my site! Including a new, horizontally scrollable gallery divided into subsections. I still don't know what the subsections are going to be... some people divide into sketches and finished pieces, or studies and original work, or fanart and original work, or divided by fandom or year... Lots of different taxonomies and I don't know which I like the best. I do like the idea of having my kink stuff on the same page if only because I love attention and making people take an extra step to get to the goods might discourage them. I'd like to make the images clickable so you can view them in focus, and to also have an overlay that loads on top of the NSFW/kinky galleries which makes you click a button to confirm that you're over 18... and happy to see naked bodies and minds contorted in the horror of their own vulnerability. It's a courtesy more than insurance I can guarantee on, but it seems the right option for now. The other option for this is to have a landing page with all the content warnings, but that means people won't get this warning if they're linked to pages other than the front page (unless I want an annoying overlay on top of the entire site). It's tricky!
I've always wanted my site to have the bare minimum of pages and page navigation but I'm now wondering if I want a more labyrinthine, fluid page structure. The former is probably better if I want attention and people to find what they came for, but the latter is enticing - I like sites that feel like I'm doing a Wikipedia dive into someone's mind and passions. I'll experiment with this!
Related to that thing of usability versus a satisfying journey, I've been thinking about how the right amount of friction in a tool can be good. Open source and you-own-the-data type software is typically harder to set up than stuff that works out of the box without setup. But it means you're forced to get to solutions in roundabout ways which itself is a creative and stimulating process. I've been using Obsidian to track my different creative projects and it's messy and a little awkward (tables are annoying as fuck even with plugins to increase their functionality) but I love the way that I can traverse my mess of notes and make new connections from them and remember projects exist in a more organic, less guilty way. It deals with my memory issues but appeals to my enjoyment of cataloguing stuff in a kind of disorganised way and scavenging through my scraps later.
today I went out to get breakfast and coffee for myself and my partner 🥰 I do feel very lucky that we live where we do with such a nice café on our doorstep!
While I was waiting for my order, I drafted some more stuff for the hypnosis file I'm writing. It's all about your mind having holes that can be fucked which is a niche I've surprisingly never seen much of, despite things like earfucking and unusual drone genitalia being so popular. It's become inadvertently very techno-horror with a lot of 'brain as computer' type metaphors, but from the perspective of someone who isn't very technologically gifted, which is perhaps a minus towards it being generalisable to the hypnosis community at large which has such a huge amount of actual computer programmers who will probably find it a little cheesy.
I'm having fun with slowly growing the script, though much like my fics where the foreplay and setup can be excruciatingly slow, I haven't quite gotten to the point of the brainfucking yet. I think there is a level of not knowing when the listener (who... is also me, because this is a file for me first and foremost) will be deep enough via enough trigger words and free association and visualisations to start getting to the goods. The key trouble with files is the speaker needs confidence as a bare minimum and I'm concerned that spending so long on the induction and deepening may inadvertently betray a lack of it.
Dirty talk in hypnosis is so hard to get right. Like I have my own personal preferences, of course - it can't be too bluntly sexual or it can be jarring, or not focused enough on the power play. You sort of have to speak the language of associations, of symbols, of homonyms, because really you're speaking to the listener's unconscious, and you have to trust that they'll pick up the cues. That's tricky to do intentionally but I am finding it an amazing writing exercise. Poetry for a captive audience.
I've been working on a bunch of different comics just restlessly jumping around scripts and thumbnails and panels and it's a little bit dizzying. It feels like there is so much to learn and to consciously absorb and I have so many projects going on right now but it is also exciting to never have nothing to do, to have it all ready to go when I have the inclination.
I want to study more about the comic form. A lot of the resources I've encountered so far feel reassuringly like concepts from film theory (especially sequential/continuity stuff, like the fact comics are usually expected to respect shot/reverse shot rules), but I don't want my comics to just be elaborate storyboards for films that don't exist. I am gonna pick up Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud soon which should hopefully illuminate some things. Any other recommendations about the form would be welcome. :)
I have figured out that my Otto Mentallis/self insert comic is probably going to be episodic, and possible to prolong forever in line with the infinite kinky brainfucky scenarios he inspires. Which does reduce some of the pressure, because I don't have to exactly know what will come next; I can approach it more like a set of short stories that don't have to be super connected.
I think also this tendency towards planning and spinning too many plates means I am overdue some creative inputs! So I am probably going to do some style studies, and I also want to finish watching MGS4 (need to get to Screaming Mantis my beloved! this series is just SO my shit!).
I have a big pile of comics to read on my coffee table. I want to finish the Alison Bechdel collection I've been reading, probably this weekend. I don't normally like slice of life much, but I am super captivated by the snapshots of history in her comics, with how much I am reminded of the queer communities right here in my town, and nostalgic for being out in the queer world before the pandemic. I also really want to pick up her autobiographical graphic novels! I'm also going to finally fucking read Watchmen, which I did start, but never finished because reading comics on a phone is a little taxing, but luckily I dug up my physical copy. And I want to revisit Jhonen Vasquez's comics, a very early and very edgy inspiration of mine. I've been told by numerous sources that Johnny the Homicidal Maniac is much harder to enjoy as an adult because of the excessive and silly amount of edginess (you really had to be there aka reading them for the first time as a goth teenager and thinking they were the coolest thing ever and constantly goofing about how "this was written by the Invader Zim guy wow lol why did nickelodeon hire him based on THIS") but I cannot state how inspirational those comics were when I was a kid. Aesthetically I still adore their brutal b&w expressionism full of Dutch angles and wild gore. So that's my plan for this weekend! ❤️
