Wayne Molly

Page 1

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Notes: Around the time I began drawing Zoonbats, I was living miles out of town on a country road similar to this highway. It was the only place I could find to rent at the time, and although it was beautiful out there, I was constantly nervous that my car, which could generously be called unreliable, would give up the ghost and I’d be stuck with a long bicycle commute for the foreseeable future. At first, though, everything was all right, and it was my only experience to date of living in a place where I didn’t need to lock the doors – in fact, I didn’t even need to close the doors.

As it turned out, the car was more reliable than the owners of the house, who commenced on a protracted remodeling schedule almost as soon as I moved in. Gradually, the house was dismantled as I continued to live there, and little regard was given to the rather high rent I was paying. Each day I’d return home from work to find some part of the house’s interior gone without warning. As the seasons began to change, the kitchen became unusable. Finally the bathroom was gutted one day, so I packed up my room and left.

With no place to live for a while, I spent a lot of time at the library drawing, and that’s when Zoonbats began. I remember penciling the first several pages and getting ready to ink. I was wondering if should hatch the pages or not. A major decision that I spent about three minutes considering, that led to untold hundreds of hours of drawing tiny hatch marks.

Page 2

Notes: Wayne’s compact communication tablet is of Minshan origin – it was a gift from Bloom. Bloom herself is from Minsha, and moved to Haquel as a teenager with her mother when her parents got a divorce. Due to this circumstance, she has an easier time than most Silnai in traveling back-and-forth from moon to moon, and does so yearly to visit with her father.

The ‘spectacles’ seen on Bloom’s face aren’t just cartooning shorthand for regular glasses, but are actually implants that serve a similar vision-corrective function. Plus, they have added functionality. She can cycle through different vision modes including thermal and night vision, both of which she uses to great effect when sneaking through train yards and other off-limits locales to write graffiti. On the downside, they mark her as a Minshan because this type of technology is not available anywhere on Shinma. Although quite fashionable on Minsha, they are a symbol of the class inequality of the two moons due to the ongoing embargo.

Toast’s robot’s name, Inaara, is an acronym standing for It’s Not Actually A Real Acronym. Although not his first robotic creation, it is one of his first, and by far the most ambitious and successful. He goes into some detail about his inspiration for creating it later in the story.

Page 3

Notes: Niana is a levitating, orbiting city that serves as a port between Shinma and the other moons and planet. Although it’s not the only way off the moon, it’s the primary one and the only one available to law-abiding citizens. Click on the World link for more information.

Toast’s nebulous hunches about Inaara’s destinations are not entirely unfounded, but it’ll be a while before he learns exactly why and how they are accurate.

Is that a late ’90s model personal computer and webcam that Bloom has at her apartment? Well, not as such… technically it’s a late ’20s model, as this Zoonbats story takes place in the year 3331. Like Wayne’s compact communication tablet, this computer comes from Minsha and would actually be considered quite advanced by Shinma standards of the time… yet, as in our own world, the pace of consumer technology on Minsha is fast, and this machine is indeed rather outdated. It’s difficult and expensive to move items like this legally from Minsha to Shinma, and as one might expect, there are thriving grey and black markets that cater to that sort of thing.

From a creator’s perspective, I chose to represent many aspects of this ‘alien’ world in starkly similar ways to the real world rather than developing completely imaginary and uniquely otherworldly technology and props – many of which would require some sort of exposition to make their functions and workings understandable and believable to the audience. Ultimately it’s a stylistic preference, and I can understand the other side of the coin, of wanting to see a fully realized and very unfamiliar kind of alien world. But something that is lost in that approach is the palette of mundane, everyday details that I personally enjoy. Not to mention an immense amount of time spent arbitrarily designing an alien stop sign, and an alien wastebasket, and an alien doorknob, etc.

Page 4

Notes: Good thing Bloom has that Ceb Nightlife travel guide. She’s well-traveled indeed, although her usual means of getting around when in Sil is via freight trains. And though most of her information on finding graffiti spots comes via word-of-mouth from other artists, a guide like this still has some handy maps and information.

Eunil, Ceb is the site of the annual Fromage Festival, some billboards and advertisements for which start to become visible in later pages. Initially a rather obscure regional celebration of artisan cheeses, a combination of happenstance and corporate sponsorship has caused the festival to become a huge and increasingly bizarre destination event for people from all over the moon and beyond.

Most of the decor visible in Bloom’s apartment is adapted from items that were at a defunct coffee shop that I was sitting in as I was penciling these pages. In the early years when I was starting out drawing comics, it never even occurred to me that I could refer to real world locations to derive my settings. It was a revelation when I saw recognizable locations woven into a fictional narrative. In retrospect it seems like it should have been obvious that that was not only an option, but a standard practice. But we all learn different techniques at different times, particularly when working in isolation. In more recent years there have been more and more formalized educational structures developed to teach the ins and outs of this literary form, so hopefully more young artists can get up and running faster, without having to reinvent various types of ‘wheels’ through trial, error, and luck.

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Notes: Wayne’s long trek continues, but at least we can surmise that it’s a nice afternoon for a hike, as he’s comfortably wearing his signature hoody while loaded up with all the possessions he took with him during his recent apprenticeship at the henchberry orchard. He’s on Highway 11, heading southeast from Ikuma toward the next small town, Miya Bay, and there’s very little traffic. The one car that we do see pass him by as he tries in vain to hitch a ride – which he then derides as lacking style – is loosely based on my first set of wheels, an ’83 Corolla. A car not lacking in comics pedigree, as the popular and long-running manga Initial D featured a very similar car, a Toyota Sprinter Trueno. Considered a classic among Japanese cars specifically with regards to drifting, the Trueno Sprinter was known as the Corolla in the West.

Of course, at the time I was driving that car, Initial D didn’t exist yet, though I was eagerly reading any translated manga I could get my hands on. (This sort of thing wasn’t as easy to come by in the 80s as it is these days.) And it wasn’t until the 2000s that I’d really ever heard of drifting. But when I later learned of Initial D and the Trueno Sprinter’s relation to the Corolla, it all suddenly made sense how my Corolla had remained so stable the one time I accidentally spun it out on an exit ramp late one night. It’s probably for the best that I knew nothing of drifting then, because if I had I might have come to enjoy that sort of thing.

Page 6

Notes: Another quiet page as Wayne walks along, keeping his thoughts to himself (I don’t often use thought balloons). This is one of my favorite pages that I’ve drawn, largely because it is a quiet passage in a series that otherwise rarely has a silent panel.

I guess these sorts of things, related to overall pacing, have only become clear to me through trial-and-error. Taking on the challenge of creating comics solo, I’ve reflected over the years, is almost impossible. There are so many interdependent disciplines that require proficiency, ranging from writing of plot and dialog, to set design, framing shots, penciling and inking, lettering.

Looking at my own work critically, there’s almost nothing that I feel that I do as well as I would like to, in spite of the fact that I am doing the best that I can. But the only thing I can do is to keep going, keep learning and keep trying to apply what I’ve learned along the way. Occasionally I do something I’m really pleased with, like this page.

The sights in Miya Bay are based on real-world locations in a small town that I used to drive to while doing deliveries for a bakery. I thought it was odd that this gas station has a lamp post protruding from its roof. We can see more things that Shinma has in common with our world, including basketball and soda pop vending machines, although at least in this case I’ve invented new brands. I’ve also got some fictional sports in mind that will have to wait until later to be mentioned in the storyline.

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Notes: The conversation with the two young employees at this gas station/convenience store is based on a conversation I had in real life – verbatim, in the case of their description of what they do for fun in their small town.

There’s not much that I can imagine that can exceed the richness, and often weirdness, of the real world – anthropomorphic human/animal hybrids aside. Even the bizarre events to come in the storyline depicting Toast’s workplace later on in the story are based on real occurrences. One thing that’s gotten me through numerous fish-out-of-water workplace experiences is the knowledge that I might someday be able to adapt the weirdness into useful material for comics. Lord knows at this point I’ve got a backlog of that stuff that I’ve got to commit to pen and ink.

Other incidental details, like the stacking of paper cups on a coffeemaker and mugs on an espresso machine, are just burned into my memory from day-to-day work experience. I can mix and match those details as needed to cook up set pieces. The mundane details of everyday life are so intricate that I could get lost in the enjoyment of recreating them. But in order to not spend an inordinate amount of time on every image, it’s important to economize and let a few details suggest all the other ones that the audience will provide with their imagination.

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Notes: For reference, the population of the Haquel metropolitan area is about 9 million, whereas less than 2,000 residents enjoy (or endure, in the case of Irv and Lena) the slow life in Miya Bay. Although Haquel isn’t particularly notorious for its violent crime rate, Wayne both enjoys it as an element of impressive mystique for these two small town teens, and is alarmed by the thought of actual involvement.

What Wayne is involved in is music, particularly residing near the Timekeepers’ District in South Haquel, which is one of the historically famous districts for music. And indeed, his apprenticeship at the henchberry orchard had as much to do with his training as a drummer as it did with learning to cultivate this controversial crop – but there will be much more about all that later on.

In the meantime, he’s watching a big rig roll into the station – which, for me, provided a good opportunity to buy a toy truck for reference.

Page 9

Notes: It looks as though Wayne and this trucker already know each other from Haquel – what a coincidence that they should meet up here, thousands of miles away on the northeast coast of Ruma. In any case, it’s looking like a fortuitous meeting, as they both happen to be headed in the same direction – south to Eunil.

Frozen beef is the cargo on this rig – plus a brief mention of something “diff’rent” (hat tip to Arnold, Willis and Mr. Drummond for inspiring the bold use of an apostrophe). As will soon become apparent, Murray Sepulveda has a taste for luxury. And as should be immediately apparent, he has a preference for bold wardrobe choices. How many artists get to draw chaps repeatedly? That right there puts me in very exclusive company, I guess – not that anyone has reached out to me to bond over it or anything.

One thing’s for sure – the toy truck I got for reference was lacking in detail in the dashboard department – but I reckon that’s something I can iterate on in later pages.

Page 10

Notes: Time to fuel up, time for some exposition. Here we have some early mention of the Fromage Festival (misspelled, I’m afraid… left here as is for the time being). Its cultural cachet should not be underestimated, but we’ll have to wait a while longer before that’s really hammered home in a lavish multi-page explosion of cheese and revelry that I may or may not ever be crazy enough to write and draw. It is worth noting that in reality, the Fromage Festival is an homage to George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, one episode of which featured a raging event of just that moniker that is one of the funniest and most mysterious drawings to me from that entire, brilliant comic.

We’ve also got our first in-narrative explanation of why Toast is sporting a potted daisy on top of his head. As time has gone on I’ve felt a bit of creator’s guilt about saddling the man with that particular piece of haberdashery, but there’s some later-to-be-revealed logic to it – at least, Zoonbats-style logic, which is guaranteed to make sense only within the confines of these pages. The incident in question – or at least the final moments leading up to it – with the howler monkeys who lived upstairs from Toast, is briefly pictured many pages hence.

Speaking of Toast, we learn he’s been washing dishes at a restaurant named Plisken’s. Well, as you might have guessed, that’s a nod to Snake Plisken, but it’s also a similar-sounding name to a particular chain of 24-hour restaurants that I, too, was in the employ of, as a dishwasher and later a line cook.

Murray’s vest is emblazoned with the logo of the Hot Road shipping company, his current outfit, pardon the pun.

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