Oh my God! He's finally getting in! He's even taking the time to give a little "eff you!" to the peeps who prevented him from getting it. I realized too late that I didn't put in the girl at the will call counter with the squirt bottle... but there wouldn't have been room anyway. Either way, he's totally in. There is more though, don't worry none about that, I'm not gonna cut the story short just because he actually made it inside! Also remember that this is Dave the Punk Rock Cat, and leaving it off at one story is not his style! He's a rambling, old cat, he's got TONS of stories in mind!
This is considerably longer for a main plot in Dave history though. The last book's main plotline took 12 pages to tell, this one took 17. Hell, even before I was putting Dave into book form, his longest stories were only 3 pages. Does that mean I'm becoming a better storyteller? Or am I just good at adding fluff? :P
I've been flashbacking a lot recently. No, that doesn't mean I'm on drugs, I'm stealing a reference from the end of the Fight Club movie, when Chuck Norris finishes his long and elaborate flashback sequence, which is the movie and then segues into the final act. At that moment, Brad Pitt jokingly says to him "flashbacking, eh?" as if his character is aware that he's in a movie. This is interesting, because this isn't the only time the characters break the forth wall, but it's the first and only time in the movie that they reference, albeit subtly, that they know they're in a movie.
That has nothing at all to do with what I was going to say, however. That was a whole 'nuther tangent there. I was gonna say that I'd been flashbacking, and realizing how much my comics have changed. I feel like I do this a lot, because when you do a webcomic, you are kind of forced to confront your back-catalog on a weekly basis, if not more often. But it's been hitting me more recently, especially with the dramatic success I had with Dave while I was at Fanime, vs. my somewhat moderate success I had with other comics before. When I first started doing the whole comics thing with any amount of seriousness, my mission was to fill the hole of dark and moody comics that seems to have been left unfulfilled when Jhonen Vasquez became a professional royalties collector. I still want to do dark comics, hence my attention to the "Abyss Stares Back" project, but darkness has changed so much when I was a kid, or at least, being successful at it.
In the mean time, Dave the Cat is a good way for my hold my place as a cartoonist, while at the same time, being able to tell some decently dark stories, but with a comedic overtone to 'em. Plus... people love cats! I learned this hard, hard lesson at Fanime when I fucking ran out of books to sell.
So, I still strive to create that next generation of genuinely disturbing comics. The mean time though, we must keep our hearts light :)
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