"The good thing about writing books is that you can dream while you're awake." -Haruki Murakami
"...stories are found things, like fossils in the ground...
Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world." -Stephen King

One of the most common questions I've gotten since starting this project is "So, do you have any idea what your new book is gonna be about?" (or some variation on that theme). The answer is "Yes, I have many, many ideas." The answer is also "I have no idea at all." And both are true...

To elaborate on those answers, I'd like to talk a little about The Aviary's main "character" (if you can really call him that), The Quiet Bird-Man. How he came into being, and how he became the strange glue loosely holding together the various stories flapping around inside The Aviary.

Some nine months or so after finishing The Social Circle of Professor Winterbottom (see Part 1 if that doesn't ring a bell), I again resorted to a kind of binge cartooning to produce some new comics. I set aside a weekend to make a new story, again grabbed some random images from my "archive" for inspiration, and set about improvising a new comic. At the end of two long days, I had pencilled the 40 pages which now appear as the first story in The Aviary, called (simply enough) The Quiet Bird-Man. The random images I was working from included things like ocean liners, architecture and mermaids, but it was an old advertisement that sparked the first page of the story:

Why did that doll became an odd bird-headed man in fancy-dress? I don't exactly know. A simple answer would be that I just felt like drawing it that way. And as simple as that sounds, it hints at why I'm leaving this project so wide open as I dive into making a new book. Making comics isn't just a matter of writing a story and then illustrating it in a series of images. Well, it can be, but those aren't the sort of comics I'm interested in making here. I'm interested in cartooning, where images have room to inform and inspire the narrative, and vice versa. So a simple impulse to draw a bird's head on a doll led to a bird-man in old-fashioned formalwear, which led to the accompanying text calling him a "sterling example of dignified repression", which would inform the course of that whole story. And the way I happened to draw his big round eye gave me the idea for the doll's "blinking-eye mechanism ("sure to delight"), which would become the Quiet Bird-man's sole method of communication with the other characters. In that first story, the Bird-man was a doll that would lead its owner on a strange journey...

After completing that comic I went on to create a few seemingly unrelated stories. But I continued drawing that Bird-man, and I found myself wanting to draw him into another comic. This time (in Funnyman) he would appear to one character in dreams, walking like a man, leading that character on an uncomfortable journey into his subconscious...

Still later, I found that the Bird-man seemed to work his way into many of the comics I was making, connecting them in a way I hadn't initially imagined. So I sort of followed where he led and began to see a larger shape to the stories that would eventually become The Aviary. Here he is again, appearing to a prisoner of war at a traumatic moment...

And here he is again, making a surprise appearance in another improvised comic (Barry Pago, Crime Scene Photographer, pencilled in one 20-hour session) - a surprise even to me at the time, the idea to have him appear occurring more than halfway into this story's creation - this time as a ghost, urging one character towards a dark fate...

The more I thought about the Bird-man (and thought about potential ways of drawing him), the more I was able to explore the world of The Aviary and find things I would not have if I had just sat down and wrote out a story to illustrate. So that's what I'm hoping to do over the next six or so months of this project - take the time to explore a new little world in words and pictures, and find a story to tell that I couldn't find any other way. And thanks to you, I'll be able to - I hope you're excited to be along for the ride!