Don't be ashamed of the creative urges which drive you. And certainly don't be ashamed of your ego. Hubris is only hubris when it fails. When Hubris pays off, we call these people geniuses.
Music will save your life, but may leave you with a life not worth saving. The characters Phonogram tends to follow are extreme cases.
THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is unlike True Detective as: it features women who do things. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE is like True Detective as: we shamelessly rip off huge chunks of stuff from Alan Moore.
A synopsis of every story we do: someone gets over their own stupid ass.
When you have characters talking about music in any way, especially about music someone doesn't know, some people presume it's about showing social capital and sneering at those who don't have it.
Phonogram is the memory of a long period in my life through a surprisingly small filter. Those characters are basically the golem who accompanied me on that decade and a half.
I’ve always thought that if comics are a part of pop culture [then] they should reflect pop culture, but a lot of the time comics, superhero comics especially, just feed on themselves. For me, comics should take from every bit of pop culture that they can; they’ve got the same DNA as music and film and TV and fashion and all of these things.
Self-publishing in comics is core to the whole artform. There is no scarlet letter in comics as there still is, to some degree, in prose. As no publisher for a long time would publish serious work in comics, the only way a lot of it came out was because of self-publishing. Many of the greatest works of the medium are self-published.
Late night chaining of videos and basically obsessing are rare for me, and often I've never even seen the videos of my favourite songs. That said, in terms of my own personal magic, video has probably rated lower than most music fans.
I've never had much attraction to writing fanfiction. I don't spend much time thinking about properties I don't own, as it's 'wasted' brain-cycles.
Phonogram was explicitly about our world. It’s a fantasy which is happening around us all, unnoticed except for those who’ve fallen into its world. In a real way, it’s real. Conversely, W+D is much more overt. The appearance of the gods changes the world, and has changed the world going back. There’s the strong implication that certain figures in our world simply didn’t exist in The Wicked And The Divine‘s world, because they were replaced by a god.
Self-publishing is still my basic recommendation to anyone wanting to do comics. Do it. Do it until you get good. Do it after you get good. It's good for your spirit as a creator.
