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Month: September 2024
Thinking back on Annie Forever
Just a quick little retrospective to mark the changing of the seasons, as it were.
Annie Forever ended on September 2nd, 2024, after 82 unmissed daily updates. That’s a pretty good score for me these days. All strips are and will continue to be available online for as long as possible, but they’re also available in the form of a neat little packaged PDF/CBZ ebook that you can buy for €5 on Gumroad whenever you want, to keep forever, even if syndicate lawyers get mad at me even though Annie is in the public domain and I’m definitely allowed to do this. Oodles of bonus features include commentary on every strip, analysis, some insight into the origin of the Knife and Dime, and into my process.
Here are some things I learned doing Annie Forever.
- This is the first webcomics project I’ve started and finished exactly according to plan in my adult life. Everything else has just sort of fizzled out, even things that ran for hundreds of strips. Turns out: It feels very good to actually finish something, and that’s a high I would like to keep chasing.
- Updating regularly was, honestly, really good for my brain. Getting up at 7am to move the image and the newspost to the right folder first thing every morning isn’t a huge activity, but it fully activated me every morning in a way nothing else does.
- Several readers indicated that they felt like they were missing something not being familiar with the original comic strip. I assumed a slightly broader reader familiarity with Annie from other media, and part of my style at this point, I think, is to imply a wider world, a bigger story, which I do in Annie Forever by suggesting a bad bridge-burning occurred between Annie and Oliver Warbucks some time before Annie Forever, and I also failed to communicate that it was meant to feel like you’ve just… started reading and keeping up with a strip in the newspaper one day, with no meaningful way to read anything back.
Anyway, I trust my readers can generally keep up, and if they trust me as a cartoonist at all, I hope they trust I’ll tell them about additional context they might want or need. - My comics production speed was always just under seven strips a week. I could easily produce two or, on a good day, even three black-and-white strips, but then life would get in the way and/or the full-colour Sunday strip would slow me down again. With time I could’ve got to a good point with that, but if I’m ever gonna do this kind of daily schedule again, I’d probably have to make a change somewhere — no Sunday, black-and-white Sunday, maybe hire a colourist for the Sunday, something would have to change about the Sunday. But my next project is pages instead of strips, probably two a week at first, so the point is moot for now, anyway.
- That next project will not be Annie Forever, but I deliberately called the book “volume one” and I do now know what happens to Annie next. Annie WILL return.
I’ve had almost a month off now, and I miss updating regularly a lot, so I’ll just say: We’re closer to new comics than we are to Annie Forever ending.
Notes on a Multiverse #2: “You ever see that really old movie?” (“Spider-Mania”)
These stories weave through our lives like, well, webs around criminals or flies. We relate to them in different ways on different days. This summer, all eight Spider-Man movies were rereleased to cinemas.
Sunday, June 16th, 2024. We go see 2002’s Spider-Man. Having been on a few field trips with a high school class I student taught, I relate to Peter’s teacher more than I do to Peter. These kids should be more upfront with each other. And less noisy during the Oscorp employee’s presentation, yeesh.
On Thursday I practiced my final presentation, and after the movie we walked through the graduation show. I did this two years ago, and I am, in a way, transported right back there, but I already have the credits for the art bit, so I don’t have to this go around. I don’t miss it — the ideal form for my work is a website or a book, not a wall. I find myself wondering if Stan or Steve would be able to relate.1Stan, no, Steve, probably, but you try getting it out of them from behind their personalities.
It rains the whole way to the cinema, and then the whole way back.
Tuesday, June 18th, 2024. 2004’s Spider-Man 2. We go see 2004’s Spider-Man 2. On Thursday I’m giving my final presentation, so I relate to Otto, who knows he has something, but may or may not come across like Charlie from Always Sunny going the full Pepe Silvia. I relate to Harry, who feels like he’s going insane knowing what is to him a truth.
I realise everyone in these movies has the same arc; where the story is Man vs Monster, the emotional core for everyone is Man vs Self — they all have to be different versions of themselves to reconcile their inner turmoil and become their true selves. If the final presentation is the Monster to slay, was the course as a whole the Self?
Sunday, June 23rd, 2024. We took a break because I had to give my final presentation, successfully wrapping up a 2-year bachelor’s degree in art education with good grades, but we’re back, and go see 2007’s Spider-Man 3.
This morning I threw out my back again. I relate to Pete’s back issues from the last one, and to his being surrounded by way too many villains trying to kill him at once. I relate to Dr Conners never having to be the Lizard. In the Dark Pete segment, where he dances through the streets of New York, I relate to the folks it does kinda work for, actually. I wish I could be timeless like these people.
It’s getting sunnier again. It’ll be 26°C out when I get my diploma. I should get some… hand fans.
Sunday, June 30th, 2024. On Thursday I graduated with good grades. There was a speech. My legal name is late in the alphabet but they went in random order and I got to go first, which was: Nice. On Saturday, after #TARDISclub, we drove to my parents’ house for dinner in my brother’s new, first car.
And then on Sunday, we saw 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
In my Letterboxd reviews, I defend these movies — I think, removed from the immediacy of, oh, this is what Spider-Man movies are now, they’re good! They’re fun! They mostly work! We’ve been too harsh on them! But sitting down to write this the day after, I realise I don’t relate to them like I did the Raimi ones. Maybe it’s that they’re young people with young problems, and the people who I might relate to more get to sit these one out on the sidelines. Or maybe it’s what the first one explicitly says is the film’s main theme — the question “Who am I?”
Because where that’s something Pete struggles with… I’ve always known exactly who I am.
And that, unfortunately is where this entry has to end. We saw the MCU Spider-Man movies on Thursday, July 11th, Sunday, July 14th, and Wednesday, July 17th, 2024, but I just don’t connect to them in the same way. They diverge from my life a little, but they’re also not really… about anything.
Those movies are about Spider-Man being in the MCU now and, try as I might, I’m not in the MCU, am I.
Have any of you read the new Ultimate Spider-Man? He has a wife and kids and a job. I don’t have any of those things but I relate to him far more than I do the Pete of the MCU.
Time to move on. Such is life.
Earths encountered
- Earth-One and its various off-shoots, where the ’92 X-Men live.
- Earth-Two, where the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man lives.
- Earth-Three, where the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man lives.
- Earth-Four, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the Tom Holland Spider-Man lives.
The oldest draft of this post is dated May 16, 2024. It was written one section at a time between June 17 and June 30, and then got a postscript on September 24, 2024.