My 6-Year Artist's Block Is Over

It was 2006 when I abandoned drawing in order to focus on NaNoWriMo, sometimes to the exclusion of all else. It wasn't even till the exact middle of JulNoWriMo 2010 that I even returned to Spanner at all (with the inspired near-final version of the Intro). Suddenly, after six years, I find myself inspired to draw again.

Now, inspiration sometimes comes for the most unexpected reasons. Shira's own tagline is "expect the unexpected". And of course she's the character I've started to draw again. So why did I start drawing her again? Why, because her butt is so beautiful I felt compelled to visualize it on paper.

No, I'm not posting sketches; I'm still rusty, so they're not good enough yet. I'm going to post complete drawings, done in Inkscape, in full color, showing off some of the clothes she wears in the story. There's the getup in Chapter 3 with the purple Pedobear baby tee, pleated tartan microskirt, gangsterskin boots, and Cookie Monster plushie hat. There's the (not much of a) Kitsap Kouriers uniform she hoverboards in during Chapter 4. And of course there's the sailor-suit school uniform she wears to Bangor High. Last but not least, video body paint. And then I'll update her character profile for the new Fourth Revision continuity. In the meantime, I'm going to practice so I get her looking right, and other characters as well. Once she looks right, I'll post pictures.

So now I'm drawing again. That means I'm back to teaching myself how to draw the figure. I already know a few things, but only enough to draw figures standing rigidly upright in front, back, and side views. My challenge: learn to draw my characters so they look like they're moving naturally. This is important not just for character designs and the eventual comics, but for animation as well.

And that's not all. With 50 Songs in 90 Days coming in just under a month, songs are starting to come to me again, and I realize I'm going to have to practice my singing and instruments again...

Spanner R4 Update: Mary Sue No More, or How Karen Kubota Became a Real Character (Plus: Chapter 3 Editing Strategy)

Shira’s cousin Karen Kubota is a charter member of Spanner’s original “Class of ’92”, yet for two whole decades she never fully developed into a character. She was a Buddhist “Purity Sue”, a pretty body with a pleasant manner but not much content, whose character was pretty much limited to being Compassionate, Earnest, Genki, and the Victor Laszlo to Shira’s Rick Blaine. So how did she stop being a flat Mary Sue who I avoided writing and become an actual character with an increasingly important role?

1. She developed the lacerating wit proper to a Richter-Thomas. When last night I completely rewrote an important scene in Chapter 6, she surprised me by calmly unleashing it on no less than the private owner of the Seattle-area school system, Book 1 major villain Peter T. Ross.
2. She fell in love with Shira, making the hypothetical Karen × Shira ’ship canonical at last. In the final version of Chapter 2 she now successfully convinces Shira to chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo with her by seducing her in a very sweet scene.

The second one came first. My muse, yuri fangirl that she is, pulled it on me during the massive Chapter 2 rewrite. I almost expected it. The first hit me by surprise – it didn’t sound Karen enough at first – but then I realized she’s a Richter-Thomas, and if you’re a granddaughter of two-fisted children’s author Eleanor Richter, you’d better be able to keep up with her – and if you aren’t yet, you will be eventually. Nelly Richter is the “Wicked Wit of the West”; that had to rub off on eldest daughter Reva Richter-Thomas, who in turn passed it on to at least three of the four Kubota kids: big sister Saffron, gay brother Sage, and Karen. But the key to Karen’s character remains the Japanese spelling of her name: its Chinese characters are renge, “lotus”, backwards.

Shira, Spanner’s resident canonical “Launcher of a Thousand ’Ships”, has a special weakness to beautiful women she loves, even close relatives. If she’s beautiful and Shira already loves and trusts her, getting Shira into her bed is a matter of course, if of course the woman swings that way. The Richter-Thomas women inherited a strong bisexual tendency from the Thomas side, who were German socialists and advocates of free love and Nacktkultur (nudism) during the Weimar Republic even though they were ethnically Jewish. So of course Karen got it too. Why else would she know the most effective way to touch Shira’s heart? Her relationship with her friend Colette, introduced in Chapter 3 before a villain in Chapter 5 knocks her into Chapter 13, even resembles a marriage. So when Karen’s character bloomed at last, the love quotient tripled!

This gives me hope for the remaining flat characters, including “Class of ’92” members Daisy Kwon and Marina Reyes (who now debut in Chapter 2 as tutor and student). Right now Daisy is the Korean-American version of the elegant Japanese “Yamato Nadeshiko” woman and Marina is a depressed illegal-alien girl (Mexican, of course). They’ll become more prominent when the School Arc begins in Chapter 5.

Meanwhile, my strategy for cutting down the not-yet-edited four sections of Chapter 3 is beginning to emerge. Take Part 3:

1. I combined it out of the Revision 2/3 sections “Portrait of an American Family” and “Car Song”. I was going to call it “Coming to Take Me Away” (still a scene title) but just decided (while on the pot, even; that happens) to make the final title “Car Song”. Two cars appear. I should make it three by adding one to the section’s final flashback. Willa drives one. As for the first…
2. Remember the lemon yellow Boss Mustang that Shira’s greasily tinkering with? (In the nude, even; Shira is nothing if not way too audacious to be legal for her age.) It’s now metallic cherry red, it belongs to Shira, its name is Sally, and Shira calls it “she”. Shira is notionally the daughter of Revolutionary Girl Utena heroine Utena Tenjou and archvillain Akio Ohtori. Akio has a scene-stealing car that owns you. Sally the Mustang is Shira’s version of the Akio Car, and its scene-stealing qualities are intensified by her love for it. When she finally gets to drive it in Chapter 7, Shira being Shira, the experience proves quite erotic. Just the driving, not the sequence’s concluding all-human love scene. The driving.
3. Start the section with a transitional scene. Another Shira videoblog? Lurid tabloid TV video of a wild police chase ending in a spectacular crash? Both? One then the other, or both at once?
4. Cut down the opening scene at Red House. Turn it into a sequence, in fact: Desiree tells off the Mormons, turns down a New Age cult, and with her sister and lover Charlie greets in the nude a pair of old Jehovah’s Witness ladies so that when they kiss the old ladies drop dead. That last one comes from one of the very last notes in Project Notebook #15, and this is the perfect place to put it.
5. Three bloated Revision 3 scenes to cut down: the garage, the living room and kitchen, and Willa’s car on the way to the boardwalk. Problem: too much gratuitous exposition, not enough connection with story continuity.

Talk about bloated: Part 4, “Party Crashers on the Boardwalk”, is very long indeed. Those 600+ words I need to cut? I could cut that many out of Part 4 without hurting the plot. I’ll also cut some bloat out of Parts 5 (“Your Next Trick”) and 6 (“You Don’t Know What Is What”) while changing them to fit into the stronger Revision 4 continuity.

And now to put that strategy into action…

Spanner and the Anarchist Theory of Government, Terrorism, and Crime

The article: "An Anarchist Perspective on Government" by Shane Solano, Ventura County Reporter, 5/6/2010

Spanner is my long-planned cyberpunk manga about a teenage prankster who comes into conflict with the world corporate dictatorship that is coming in our near future. Inevitably, Shira Thomas gets hauled before her self-appointed nemesis, Interpol agent Diana Shockley. Since our heroine Shira is a known anarchist, Agent Shockley tries to pin the blame on her for some terrorist gang's latest atrocity. Shira laughs at the accusation and replies: "Real anarchists don't do terrorism." To the agent's contemptuous nonanswer of disbelief, she answers: "That would be an unacceptable act of government."

So what is the notorious Spanner saying? Actually, she has a complete anarchist theory of government.

How Spanner Got Her Handle

Sometime in the late 1990s, I changed the name of the comic I've been working on since 1991 to Spanner, with my character Shira starring in her role as "angel of chaos". But I never gave the origin of the handle "Spanner" any thought. But then came a series of pranks that became #1 trends on Twitter. And suddenly it came to me. Here's the scene in which the handle's origin is revealed:

Shira is in a police interrogation room. It may be on a "guild violation" as she is violating the Police Guild's monopoly on disarming bombs, like those created by the fiendish "mad bomber" known as the Toymaker, which Shira routinely deconstructs. The interrogator is her archnemesis Diana Shockley, police agent of the United Corporations (and a member of the villainous Becket clan, owners of the ruling Dictel Corporation).

Diana: How did you become "Spanner"?

Shira: You wanna know how I got that handle? I'll tell you. You see, I own the Toymaker. I own him big time. I own him over and over and over. I used to jam wrenches into his cruder early jobs. So the trolls and punkers at 4chan/b/ declared me the "Spanner Queen of the Universe". That quickly became "Spanner, Queen of the Universe". The rest, of course, is history.

So now you know. And so do I.

Spanner: Shira Is 10!

#999 #webcomic Today Spanner main character Shira turns 10!

Back around 1995 or so, when I was in my longest period of artist's block ever and I compulsively wrote story notes for 5 full years (and then went on for another 7 or 8, only with drawings), I read a book by American ninjutsu master Stephen K. Hayes (his site here) in which he revealed to Grandmaster Masaaki Hatsumi that he was born on September 9, 1949 — the number 9 has special significance to the ninja — I realized right then that Shira Thomas would have to be born exactly 50 years later. Spanner begins right before Shira's 15th birthday. So today is a major day in the Spanner mythos. And Shira's birthday party will have to be a significant event in Black Science as well (toward novel's end, in fact).

But since Spanner is supposed to be a manga, this is a reminder that I need to start drawing again. I've been procrastinating this for over 2 years.

The Problem with Political Thrillers

There's a kind of suspense thriller that focuses on political problems and even protest. It is, of course, the political thriller. But from what I've read about political thrillers, most of them, especially the left-wing ones, share a commmon problem. It's inherent in the structure of the standard thriller:

There's only one hero.

Why is having just one hero (or a few at most) a problem? Well, political problems are collective problems. Thus, the ideal protagonist of a (left-wing) political thriller is the catalyst hero, a hero whose purpose is to call for other people to fight the Evil as to fight the Evil themself. This is Shira in Spanner. She may be effective enough at subverting the power system (e.g., the United State and its state-capitalist corporate raider controllers), but to destroy it she needs to get a critical mass of the people onto her side. So she must act as herald, bringing the "call to adventure" (in this case, revolution) to as many people as possible. She must be a catalyst.

MayNoWriMo: The Final Non-Progress Report

So MayNoWriMo is over, and I've hardly written a thing in almost three weeks. Furthermore, I haven't posted an entry here in Spanner's World in almost two weeks. So here's the final word count for the month:

• Black Science: 7,501 (goal: 50,000)
• Bad Company: 9,988 (rewrite for second draft)

So what went wrong? I came down with a nasty case of writer's block, that's what. Now it's gone away, but too late to save my MayNo.

A Simple Conflict to Complicate: Dragonites vs. Enders

I was reading a book on the Book of Revelation (also known as the Apocalypse of John), called A History of the End of the World, by Jonathan Kirsch. He shows that the last book of the Christian Bible is a rage-fuelled mind bomb so potent that it has all but dominated Western culture at least since Emperor Theodosius turned the Roman Empire into Christendom by decree in 391. But the most important point I'm drawing from it in this entry is the extreme dualism the Apocalypse embodies. From at least the middle of Black Science all the way to the end of Spanner, America is torn apart by an apocalyptic duel between two factions determined to put an end to American democracy and replace it with an apocalyptic theocracy: the Gnostic fundamentalist Dragonites, the ultra-elitist conspiracy of self-described supermen who want to reimpose the old totalitarian caste system based on a cult of blood; and the Christian fundamentalist Enders, that group of militant cults determined to put an end to the world by force. Actually, the Enders don't have to be Christian; the Islamists and the Jewish Messianists are also Enders. Both factions see the world in ultra-stark black-and-white, either-or, with-us-or-against-us terms. If you're not for one faction, they believe, you are by definition part of the other. This is a "Gordian knot" that desperately needs to be cut before it destroys the world. In my dialectical worldview, there must be a third force dedicated to disrupting both forces. This force I call the Spoiler. But the Spoiler's disruptions are useless unless (s)he fights alongside, and for the sake of, the common enemy of both Dragonites and Enders: the people.

Bad Company: The Terrorist Incubus

Charlie's lovers (her sister Desiree and her ex-girlfriend Yasmin) are stolen away from her. By a man. This man is a terrorist. His name is Ramón Gabriel, and he is a former Colombian right-wing death-squad terrorist turned Dictel corporate mercenary turned Islamic terrorist who answers to Rashid. His MO: he seduces women in such a way that they become his love slaves; then he turns them into what can only be called weapons of mass destruction. This terrorist, you see, happens to be an incubus. A demon lover.

Charlie & Desiree's Crazy Idyllic Plans

Charlie and Desiree have big plans for when they get back together after the Beckets stop picking on them. The scandals surrounding Dictel and the Becket clan in the wake of Colonel Tom Becket's disastrous coup d'état attempt give them enough of a breather to be able to at least attempt to make them a reality. These include:

1. Getting married, of course, despite the fact that they are sisters.
2. Adopting their little sister Shira as their own daughter. Their oldest sister, Ruby Shears, suggests they adopt their cousin Jennifer Blair as well, in order to keep her and Shira together so they can become as inseparable as Charlie and Desiree are.
3. A special "body positive" method of childrearing they long to try out.
4. And so on...

Nearly everybody who finds out about these plans call them crazy. You probably will too. But they're sticking to them.

Forces of Antagonism

Every story needs at least one villain, or at least antagonist. The nature of life is that one has to fight for one's desire in order to get it. It has been said that story is conflict.

Here's a particularly potent example from my fiction. As you now know, Charlie wants Desiree. The problem, of course being that the two just happen to be sisters. The two have to overcome some fearsome obstacles (society, religion, the law, etc.) and fight some really nasty villains (including their own tyrannical mother) if they want to live together, happily ever after. This is the situation in Bad Company, and it's looking to be a major factor in my 2008 NaNoWriMo novel, Points of Authority, as well.

In Spanner the antagonism is provoked not because Jennifer loves Shira, but because Shira cannot conform (note to self: I'll have to write an entry on this). Conformity is considered a primary virtue in any society that mows down tall poppies and hammers down all nails that stick out. Such is the "Eurosocialism" of the Euro=American Union, the enemies of which bluntly call it "Stalinism". And so Shira finds herself forced to fight battle after battle against authority, society, and religion just to be able to be herself, and she ends up starting a revolution.

This should be a lesson to me. I have a tendency to write scenes with lots of cool witty dialogue but little real conflict, or write feverishly idyllic little love (or other) scenes not counterbalanced by the characters' need to defend their loves (etc.) against social, religious, and political forces determined to destroy them. I have to put some balance into it, and remember that story itself is conflict. In a story, it's the villains (the "rogues' gallery" in superhero-comics terms) that makes the hero; the more effective the villains, the stronger and more interesting the hero. No conflict, no story; no villains or other antagonistic force, no hero.

Character Profile: Shira Thomas (revised 8/25/2010)

Shira Miranda Thomas, main character of Spanner, was born on September 9, 1999 to Cedric Anthony Thomas III (the legendary rocker Ric Thomas/"Red Mercury") and Hope Maureen Reston. This red-haired, dark-skinned, large-nosed beauty was a wild and mischievous child who attracted all kinds of controversy and scandal to herself. Today (i.e., during the Spanner timeline that starts in late August 2014), Hope Reston is the liberal Populist mayor of Metropolitan Seattle, making Shira a major player in the struggle to keep Seattle and the entire State of Cascadia from falling under the theocratic tyranny of the reconstituted Confederate States of America and still escape the rival tyranny of the United Corporations cartel that rules the EuroAmerican Union under the state-socialist system of Corporatism. As a leading champion of democratic Populism, Shira strives to rally people to her side through music, dance, style, and direct persuasion. But those who try to stop her in the name of Authority will find out that she is a legendary prankster for a reason...

Sketch of Shira from 2002

Spanner: Plotting the Story

Comics scripts are accepted in this year's Script Frenzy. This gave me the opportunity I needed. Now I'm writing the script to Spanner. So while I'm struggling to improve my drawing skills so that I can at least create decent character designs, I'll post here some of the scenarios most likely to make it into the actual published version.

So far, I'm considering these already composed scenarios for inclusion in the first issue:

1. The incident on the bus in which, after a pretty blonde asks Shira if she has accepted Jesus, a would-be suicide bomber attempts to blow up the bus from the seat in front of them. A change in the scenario: I originally had Shira kill the terrorist with the "evil eye," a trick she uses earlier in the novel Bad Company. But then I realized that there are some Muslims who believe that cameras steal people's souls. So now Shira will "shoot" this particular Islamist cultist with her cellphone's camera, and direct others to shoot him with their cameras as well.
2. The "flag incident." At a government function of the Euro-American Union, Shira pulls one of her legendary pranks: she torches the one-star flag behind the platform as the band is playing the instrumental version of the "Ode to Joy" that is Europe's "national" anthem. The flag burns quickly, revealing another flag behind it: a "rattlesnake flag" (or Gadsden flag) from the American Revolution, only with the legend "Liberty or Death" (or is it "Don't Tread on Me"?) replaced with, in German, in the traditional gothic typeface, the words: "Freiheit oder Tod!"
3. The scene I had once proposed as a prologue: the combined vision of a group of precognitives working for the government. Their precognition of the sequence that follows this is accurate. But then the visions fall into chaos. This is the point in the next sequence where Shira arrives, and the "Flag Incident" follows.

Along with a few new scenes and sequences, I'm building the first issue (the one I'll be drawing in June for NaNoMangO) around these three scenarios. This will make it easier for me to write the story.

I'll post these and other plot ideas here, along with various ideas behind the story. Also, I'll link to any posts in my more political blog that are relevant to the story. And, of course, I'll post my initial character profiles when I get some adequate character designs; some I'll scan from my notebooks (the picture I've posted to the initial story entry is scanned), but most of them I'll draw soon.

The United State

In 2008, freedom already seems to be on its way out as the world prepares for a class war of cataclysmic proportions. In 2014, the class war is almost here, and the world suffers under a series of brutal dictatorships meant to keep the common people down. The most powerful of these is the Euro-American Union, better known simply as the United State.

Now consider our heroine Shira, a teenage girl who cannot conform. Not because she refuses, but simply because she's incapable of conformity. She is the Random Factor that will prove to threaten the United State's very existence.

The United State tries to destroy her. But she will not go to oblivion quietly. The resulting war is the story of Spanner.

Spanner: The Identification Crisis

Not many people are probably familiar with the classic 1980s independent comic Mister X, in which the mysterious title character is repeatedly identified as someone, except that every time he is, the man he's supposed to be keeps turning up dead. In the fascist future world of Spanner, it seems the title character, identifiable mainly by helmet, flight jacket, hoverboard, and monkeywrench, pops up everywhere. Someone is identified as being Spanner and killed by the secret police, but (s)he keeps popping up. It's not that Spanner has an identity crisis. Rather, the authorities are having an identification crisis.

So what's going on here? The authorities have two theories on the subject. The first is that Spanner is one person who somehow jets around the world under their noses, thumbing his/her nose at them. The other is that Spanner is not a (wo)man but a group. In either case, the authorities consider Spanner a terrorist (or terrorist gang). But then, they consider anyone who disagrees with their absolute power to be a terrorist, by definition. Needless to say, their bureaucratic, absolutist minds are incapable of distinguishing the merely naughty from the absolutely heinous, so they treat the merely naughty as if it were absolutely heinous. Spanner, the consummate practical joker(s), takes advantage of this and uses it against them. This is the secret of his/her effectiveness against them, and his/her maddening elusiveness.

It's banal to just say that Spanner provokes the authorities to terrorist violence. Actually, the authorities need no provocation; they're too paranoid not to. Whenever they call someone a "terrorist", it's really a matter of what Shira calls "don't call me what you are", or what Freud called projection. What Spanner specializes in, and what Shira excels at, is making the authorities anything they want them to do, specifically by manipulating the hierarchical structure of government. They call this reality hacking. It's the Markoff Chaney principle (Chaney is "The Mgt.", i.e. Midget, from Illuminatus!). That's the other reason why the authorities can't catch him/her: the impersonality of their hierarchy makes it easy for him/her (or just Shira) to exploit it, so they're following orders their superiors haven't even given without any way of knowing that their superiors didn't give the orders. That's another reason Spanner is so difficult to catch.

Shira happens to be a master of misdirection, pointing the authorities toward someone else while doing what she wants with pretty much impunity. Some say she is actually a Discordian; meanwhile, some Discordians insist she is the avatar of Eris, goddess of strife and discord, herself.

What -- and Who -- Is Spanner?

character design of Shira Thomas from 2001
(and those balls in her hands are electricity generated by her gloves)

Spanner is the story of a small group of misfits — hackers, taggers, gays, punks, ravers, goths, etc. — forced to fight for their lives against the United State, a government determined to eliminate all nonconformity. And "Spanner" is the handle of their leader, Shira Thomas, a mischievous young tagger, ravepunk, and parkour devotee determined to keep her freedom at all costs -- even if it means the total destruction of the United State and even society itself. Her handle is a pun: it means 1) monkeywrench 2) one who bridges the gap.

I started work on what would become Spanner back in 1992, when I joined a Japanese animation club and hung out with the small group of aspiring manga artists who drew instead of watching the anime. I drew a series of (what are now crude) character designs between 1992 and 1994. But due to a 5-year bout of excruciating artist's block, the story and its characters didn't really begin taking shape until 1999. I amassed a huge number of story notes and character sketches in a series of what are now 14 "Project Notebooks".

Lately, I've been mostly writing a series of prequels in the form of novels, starting with the Dictel trilogy that begins with Bad Company, my winning entry in last year's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I recently finished the first draft, and I'm currently in the middle of editing it for this year's National Novel Editing Month (NaNoEdMo). The Dictel trilogy will be the subject of my next post.

Then I found out that NaNoWriMo's sister contest, Script Frenzy ("Screnzy" for short), now accepts comics scripts as entries. At once I realized that my chance to make Spanner a reality had come at last. So now I've begun planning for 100 pages or more of script, and I'm about to begin drawing a new series of character designs better than any I've ever drawn before. I know I finally have a chance to get Spanner drawn and published at last.

Stay tuned...