Kickstarter

Hi, backers.

In our original pitch, we described Azalea as being able to “draw out memories from objects just by touching them.” We were thinking less about psychometry and magic totems and more about the way we relate to objects every day, how we come to inhabit them, outsourcing our memories to mementos, giving them power beyond their practical use. One of my criticisms in “Saving Zelda” was how videogame items too often become just keys for disguised doors, losing their resonance in the process. Azalea’s ability was initially imagined as a step back into that natural wonder about the secret lives of objects.

We were also thinking about magic in our world. I’ve always enjoyed fantasy stories, but I rarely find the magic very evocative (wizard duels are particularly boring, as I never know what the rules are; or when I do, they lead to things like Voldemort losing to Harry because he didn’t do his wand homework). One way we began to talk about it involved the breakdown that occurs between subject and object. A lot of magic – telekinesis, mind-reading, fire-starting – can actually be done, albeit more slowly, with bodies and technology (minds tell hands and forklifts to move things, mouths betray thoughts to ears, matches ignite). Magic basically cuts out the middleman.

But if magic can make one’s will become reality more directly, it can also confuse one’s sense of inside and outside, subjective experience and objective world. This struck me as interesting because such confusion is already present in our daily lives. We are prone to all sorts of magical thinking; even as we age, we can’t avoid it. And so, David and I pressed ahead with a sense of magic that would hopefully relate to our actual, everyday experience of the world.

How to give shape to Azalea’s ability on the page was a challenge from the very beginning. This early concept art from last summer (before the characters were clear or the script even written) got at some of the original ideas we had, but it was too flat and boxy. It was a comic-within-a-comic, but it felt almost digital with its trail of ghostly panels. 

I discussed with David something more physical, appealing to Azalea’s senses and perception, something more analog than digital. I used the word ‘thick’ to describe the objects she touched, though I wasn’t even sure what I meant outside a contrast with the ‘thinness’ of the rest of her world. By spring, it had evolved into what you saw in the last update.

This looked beautiful and had a lot of great detail to suggest the differences in the past, but it still lacked something. The panels functioned more like overlays or windows, still too rectangular, and the golden fringe suggested an idyllic past that was certainly not the case in our world.

Recently, David came up with an approach that skewed Azalea’s visions more directly, folding the panels almost like origami and giving them a strong material contrast with the ‘real’ panels of her present. As you can see in the rough layout below, the results are less like portals, more like paper.

In some ways, this approach resonates with our original desire to make a book out of Second Quest. We knew going all digital would be easier, but when we were planning the Kickstarter, that desire to create an object that would actually unfold (like Azalea’s visions) was just too strong to ignore.

Thanks for reading!

~ Tevis

Hi, everyone. We’ve been very busy over here in the world of Second Quest, and I want to share some of our progress with you.

After “Side Quest”, I turned to finalizing the script so that David’s fantastic concept art could all come together on the page. I’d been rereading a lot of my favorite comics this winter (Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, the work of Lynda Barry and Chris Ware), but after taking a hard look at my own pages, I found that they were…hm, how to best describe them…NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

For instance, an important male character, Cale, was just not alive on the page. All along I’ve felt deeply connected to our main character, Azalea, and writing her has always come quite naturally. But with her friend Cale, I just couldn’t relate. He was too different from me, and I couldn’t find a way in.

David’s early sketches of Cale were a play on the familiar Link hero getup. But many characters in our world dress this way, so he wasn’t really distinct. Then David sent me some sketches (see below) that made one simple change: Cale became overweight. This wasn’t a major aspect of his character (it still isn’t), but seeing him this way gave me a very direct connection. For I was an overweight teenager too. Suddenly, I could feel his discomfort – with his body, with most physical activities, with the eyes of others. That constant sense that something was in the way, that your body was always so there to ground and humble you.

Cale’s development is pretty typical of the way our process works. David and I discuss the story, I go off to write a series of scenes, he draws in response to my writing, I rewrite in response to his drawing, back and forth until we’re both satisfied. It’s been a strange and thrilling aspect of writing Second Quest to have my words visualized so quickly and then have those images feed directly back into revisions. Sometimes just one small change, like Cale’s weight, can bring a character into focus and make the whole fantastical story feel more real.

Actually, since the Kickstarter ended, we’ve been striving to both embrace and move beyond the fantasy videogame archetypes that first inspired us. The script has been through many many intense revisions, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally much closer to our original vision. With all the awesome new art David has created, we are now transitioning to the comic pages themselves. And we’re more excited than ever to share the finished book with you.

We’ll be updating you every month about the development of Second Quest. So if there’s anything specific you’d like to hear more about, please let us know.

~ Tevis