Flexing

This is going to be a rather self-indulgent post, but I wanted to talk about Tranny and TV a bit, and why it's taken over my blog to a certain extent.

Basically, because it's a lot of fun, and I'm learning new Things (damn I wish Siobhan hadn't trademarked "Stuff™").

I've always been interested in comic strips, I used to doodle them as a kid, but soon ran into a problem: I can't really draw. Certainly not any anything alive, and nothing to the standards of the experts.

As a child I used to do brilliant Heath Robinsonesque pictures of machines with pipes and valves and articulated arms, all patiently detailed and shaded. But when it came to figures and animals... meh. I kinda wish I'd persevered with it and taken life classes and stuff, but I wonder if there's even any innate skill there to develop anyway.

So cartooning lapsed as I got older. Then as a student I got involved with the drama society. In the first year we put on a revue-type show, and I wrote some of the sketches. That seemed to go down well, so in the second year I was commissioned to write and direct the whole Christmas play! That turned out to be a skewed remake of the Wizard of Oz, with a whole load of new characters. The actors who played the Munchkin-like characters had to shuffle around on their knees through the whole production. I'm probably personally responsible for a statistical spike in lower back problems in my age bracket.

It was all very studenty, but a huge amount of fun, and it taught me a hell of a lot about writing. It also gave me a lifelong love of writing dialog, and a lot of my creative writing since has taken that form.

Then recently I had the idea of doing a skit of the "Mac and PC" ads that Apple were running, but turning it on it's head. Rather than a pair of humans acting like machines, why not make it a pair of machines acting like humans?

At first I thought I could only achieve it with some form of animation. Then after tinkering about in Photoshop a bit I realised it would work as a comic strip.

The first one was very much a direct parody of an Apple ad, but when I finished it I thought of other things I could do with the same characters. Tranny and TV could be a way of talking about my opinions on TG culture in a different way, and even just "telling jokes".

It's strange, but I kind of knew straight away what they were like as personalities, and that they had "other things to say". Fuck, this is sounding pretentious. Bear with me, it gets worse.:-)

The fact that they're inanimate objects who can't move or emote is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because I don't have to draw anything (except maybe the odd KKK hood!), but it also means that all of the emotion has to come from the dialog. It's a challenge to get the dialog to convey everything I want to, but it's a challenge I'm relishing.

In a lot of ways it's similar to the act of writing a script. Except that instead of relying on the actors to express each line in the right way, I'm relying in many ways directly on the reader having a shared understanding of how the character would act. (I told you the pretentiousness would get worse!)

It's also enjoyable learning the "craft" of comic strips. Working out how to tell a story in a restricted amount of space (500 by 700 pixels, fact fans!). Little things. Like the way that TV slides across the full length of the panel in the latest strip. The words are deliberately all in one long line, and TV has to slide left-to-right because that's the way the text is read. Also, although the speech bubble's tail points to the far right, it's anchored at the far left, where TV would have started talking. Working out subtle things like that is immensely satisfying, for some reason.

Basically, the main motive for me having this web site is to occasionally flex my creative muscles, and Tranny and TV is just a new way of doing that. I'm not pretending it's the best thing since sliced bread, but it is something that I'm enjoying doing and sharing with you.

Whether you like it or not. ;-)