You may know that I read all the feedback on my comics, and I take it seriously. Sure, some of it’s nonsense purely as a symptom of the sheer number of people leaving feedback – if you ask a thousand people for advice, at least thirty of them will talk total BS (I’m normally one of those myself), so you have to hold all this stuff fairly lightly.
But some of the advice will be wonderful. For this upcoming comic, I’ve allowed myself to be steered gently by a single piece of feedback which caught in my mind – “We’re emotionally invested in these two”. Yeah, I kind of get that. Previously, I’ve said my comics needed ‘less chat’ – but that does tend to be the feedback of the truly horny – stop talking start humping. And in my drunk state I was certainly guilty of that one. So I have to ask what is the purpose of these comics – if its just to get myself ‘off’, then yeah the comics could all be a bit shorter. But the balance would then mean that we wouldn’t be emotionally invested … in any character. And if you’re not emotionally invested, then it becomes a mechanical process. There are plenty of other comics out there like that; in fact I’d argue the vast majority of porn/erotica in general is like that – and it’s not helping anyone to either get off, or move on.
So I need to strike this balance between believable levels of chat, and boring levels of blah blah blah. The next comic is one which I’ve allowed to get into more banter, and I’ve structured the whole thing to build the horniness bit by bit over the course of a single day – so by the time the main characters can go home, we’re all absolutely blazing! Which is what it’s like in real life. I’m sure a lot of readers will skip to the juicier bits, but I’ve let this comic take its time early on, for the sake of the readers who are emotionally invested, who are ready to be taken along the path of this little love story, and to experience the extraordinary wonder of the highs in their fuller context.
Perhaps the magic of the coming-of-age story is something that is awkward, discordant at times – perhaps part of the magic is in the difficult bits, and if we edit all the difficult bits out, we are editing out the life. And if we edit out the life, what do we have? Not life. So life is hard sometimes, and that’s ok.
So it’s a love story. A gentle one. And the ending is just … it’s good, it’s good.
EDIT: I mean the ending of this upcoming comic, I’m not saying this ending is the end of the series! No no no. The comic is still ongoing at this stage. I’ll give more of a heads-up when the actual end’s in any way coming up, don’t worry.
