If any of the electrical engineers in my family are looking for a gift for me, I’d love a device that says “Days Since Matt Last Started a Project” and had a button so I could easily reset it. Because its a new week and I have a new project I’m working on.
I say new, but it doesn’t really feel like that. The initial seed was new. “Why not just start a small comic that has no plan, we’re just drawing something fun? Like the life of a 6-inch person.” That was the seed and it grew and grew, as my ideas tend to do. But instead of spiraling and growing on its own, this little idea went a different direction. It started consuming and merging with a few other ideas I’ve had in the past that weren’t really enough to be their own thing yet but can gladly be a part of this one.
No Job Too Small was the name of a similar themed story of mine, where an astronaut has ended up at this small scale and goes from depression to trying to get his life back together. A neat concept I’ve been noodling on for years, but while I have some interesting thoughts about what you can do at that size, there was never really enough going on, even for a slice of life. I might return to it someday but Downsize is taking a few of the ideas for tech I did have, and a few of the stories, but it goes on to its own thing to add more story: This is a superhero world, and the titular Downsize is the heroine. Suddenly a lot more going on with it.
The First Bank of Distrust is an idea I’ve had just recently. It’s the juxtaposition of two ideas for a super-world organization: What if there was an evil bank that was really good for its clients? By evil bank, I mean they don’t care where your money came from, they don’t tell the IRS or the FBI or whatever. This is where Dr. Impossible can have an account that is never frozen or drained. But then on the flip side, it’s good to the clients. Fees are only for people who can afford it, small time villains can get loans and grants, and the bank doesn’t worry about secret identities. Spider-man can open an account and have the checks from a book he wrote go here, where he can then use the money, instead of having secret identity issues.
That part of the idea is still new to me, but I have no problem setting Downsize in a world like that. Being tiny is going to be a nightmare in trying to deal with most institutions. How does a person who can’t carry a phone or a wallet or any form of ID get anything done in this world? No idea and that’s interesting. Attached to the Bank of distrust is an older idea I had called CONCIERGE. This is an organization who are there to make life simpler for their clients. This is the group that will arrange for your children to get picked up from school if your heist runs long. They’ll arrange for an biographer to interview you and publish your side of the story, so you can accrue royalties while in jail or doing hero work. They copyright your costume and arrange for getting a cut of the merch. Anything you need, they’re there to provide, no matter how mundane, or how weird it might be. Attaching these guys to the Bank of Distrust feels like a natural fit
An idea I’m still toying with including is the idea of a world where crime is illegal, but supervilliany is not. You have to do some strange things to qualify, like dress up in costume, rant for a set period of time, basically you have to have a chance of being beaten by heroes who show up to stop you. It becomes this great game, but you can have celebrity super villains and superhero gig work. It might work well enough to be an interesting story. We’ll see if I commit to that as we progress.
On the creation side of things, I realized that this would be the perfect project to do something I’ve thought about for years. What if instead of me free-drawing all the backgrounds, making up scale and perspective, mostly doing a quick bucket fill with maybe a horizontal-ish slash to show where the wall and the floor meet- what if instead of all that, I model things in blender and have them for reference, if not actually in the background itself?
Well, the first and obvious reason is that I don’t really know what I’m doing. But this feels like the perfect project to learn.
So that’s what I’ve been doing the last 2 days. I found a website that let me build out a floorplan and figured out a way to make walls based on that. And now I’m slowly figuring out furniture bits.
Blender’s a weird piece of software. Every year or so I take another stab at figuring it out and I think I get further each time. I really think that if I had some sort of class that forced me to sit down and figure it out, I could do neat things. But it always takes more effort than seems worth it, and I stop after a while. But having small goals is helping. When I sit down tonight to work on it, I don’t need to build the apartment completely. I just need to model a coffee table. And I don’t need to be perfect now. Once I get something that works, I can start using it, and then this set is still here, where I can add more details to it later.
This couch was fun to model. I followed a tutorial about 6 times before it actually came out decently couch shaped. It’s not a great model, or accurate, but it looks like a sofa and that’s what counts.
I have an event next Saturday that going to take up a bit of my thoughts, but I’ll see if I can’t get some sort of interesting story written and ready for composition.
This project was supposed to be a small thing that doesn’t matter, just a way to start doing comics again. But it’s grown into something bigger and I’m kind of excited to see where it will take me.