Things Change is my second ongoing webcomic. The first was called Maroon and ran for 52 weekly episodes (about one year). The story of a man stranded on a tiny island limited a lot of story elements and allowed me to focus on some formal experimentation (and learning to draw again after years of neglecting the skill), but after a year the time was ripe for trying something a little more expansive. I needed to try more characters, backgrounds, objects, and I wanted the opportunity to vary my style more often.
To write Things Change I’m using Ovid’s Metamorphoses–in a few translations though mostly the translation by Horace Gregory (because it is a pocket paperback and is easy to take with me for reference and rereading) with supplemental reading of the Allen Mandelbaum translation (the version I first read of the poem)–as a generative text. I am not directly adapting Ovid’s work, rather I am using his stories as a jumping off point for characters, events, themes, images, words, or whatever else seems useful for the particular story. You probably won’t see gods and goddesses or mythical monsters (at least not in an obvious sense), but certainly the theme of change will be prevalent (hence the title).
As in Maroon, Things Change will also serve as a vehicle for further formal experiments in layout, style, composition, breakdowns, and other parts of the comics lexicon. I’m always looking for serious comments on any of these elements, so please leave a comment or contact me.
Book One and Book Two are made up of short stories, that can, for the most part, be read individually. Book Three is a single long narrative (now complete), as is Book Four.
As of November 2009, with the end of Book Four, Things Change is on (possibly permanent) hiatus, while I work on other comics.