Llyw:
Welcome to Happily Right Now! I’m not a big fan of authors who go on and on about their own work. To me, ideally, HRN shouldn’t need any more introduction than “Once Upon a Time…” So if you haven’t done so already, go read the comic for a bit… enough for you to form a bit of an informed opinion of your own about it.
Don’t worry I’ll be waiting right here for you… Go on…
…there see that was pretty cool wasn’t it? Since you’re back here though I guess now you want some back-story on what this whole thing is about, huh? Well I’ll tell you how it all started…
Once upon a time in Osaka, my good buddy Ian and I set out to visit Toudai-ji temple in Nara. It’s the home of the world’s largest indoor Buddha statue. (really cool, you should totally go there) On the hour or so train ride over there we got to talking about webcomics, and how we both were getting nowhere with the ones we were trying to start at the time. Y’see neither Ian nor myself is an artist in the person-who-is-able-to-make-pretty-pictures sense of the word. We’re writers, and the artists we had chosen to team up with for our respective webcomics were showing no signs of ever actually drawing the comics we were writing.
So after a fair bit of venting we got to talking about some of the other story ideas we had been kicking around. And I mentioned that I had been thinking about fairy tales a lot recently, particularly about what motivation all these Dragons and Ogres and whatnot would have for capturing these fair princesses and getting slain for it. We talked about it being a kind of medieval matchmaking service, and went from there.
Pretty soon we had characters and scenarios and we’re keeping each other in hysterics simply by improvising dialogue with one another, all the while walking around some of the oldest and most beautiful buildings in Japan. (neener)
Over lunch the same day we decided that this story was too funny to keep to ourselves, and if we couldn’t depend on our artist friends, then we could try depending on each other. And thus, Happily Right Now was born.
HRN is a shared effort, we take turns drawing ‘pages’ and we discuss the story regularly. As I’ve said, we’re writers, not illustrators. So if you take issue with either Ian’s drawing style or my own, all I can say is: sorry, we will get better with practice. Honestly, if you’re able to tell who’s who and what’s going on in the story I’m willing to consider that a success.
For now our goal is to have a new page up for you every week, though that schedule may change as time and interest allow. Also we’ll be trying to add cool stuff to the site as well as links to all the other cool things that Ian and I do.
Thanks for coming. I hope you’ll enjoy Happily Right Now as much as I am, and feel free to drop me a line anytime.
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Ian:
So as Llyw said we are alternating who draws the page. If you're curious, it's every other page, and Llyw did the first one. Once we get our acts together I'll put something up designating who's comic it is that week. The mechanics of the way this comic is getting written (at least for now) is this: the main story arc, characters, and plot elements were all worked out on that day in Nara which I'm sure will be commemorated eventually by a big statue and/or shrine. They're nuts for that kind of stuff down there. We get together and work out the details of what happens for a few pages in a row so we each know what to work on. At that point we also discuss suggestions for dialogue, though whoever's drawing a given page has final say on what goes in, adjusting dialogue and visuals to fit; He just makes sure it ends the way we agreed for that oh-so-flawless blending you see between each episode. As a result of this system there's a lot of individual freedom of expression (that's good), and a lot of irregularities between pages: people lose and gain items of clothing etc. (that's usually bad, but we'll just claim it's our ouevre and therefore good). In the end since I can't draw the same face from panel to panel it's all a fairly moot point anyway (either that or I'm just ingeniously changing the "actors" playing each "role" to comment on the universality and self-association inherent in any fairy tale, you never know).
Based on the gag in the first episode I don't think I'm giving much away by saying one of the points of this comic is relationships, the kind we envision in our childhood based on fairy tales, how totally screwed up they were, and yet, deep down, how we still think they're true. The unapplicability of the relationship templates in our mind was made even worse when our fairy tale-telling rights were given for free to Disney and its ilk. Rather than keeping the complicated really quite dark originals, which spoke to issues deep in our psyche...or at least deep in the psyche of a bunch of weird Germans, we got an insidious sugary version. Don't get me wrong, this comic isn't a thesis for some class on Campbell and mythology, there'll be terrible jokes aplenty. Which is kind of the point. People fight, get drunk, and listen to crappy, crappy music all the time in real life, but never in our sweet imaginations of the knight riding in to save the princess.
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