"Wat Do" -- The Beginning

I posted this picture to my facebook wall on March 11th, 2010.

It was the first "comic" I ever drew. I made it immediately after discovering that my first love had a new boyfriend. The story behind its creation goes something like this:

I remember sitting in class, at school, when I stumbled upon the news via facebook. Despite anticipating it months ago, I still reacted very poorly. I remember my chest tightening, and feeling very cold all of a sudden. My perceptible world shrunk to a small block of pixels on my computer monitor, within that block sat a string of words that I refused to believe. Feeling shocked and confused, I got out of my seat without thinking and left the classroom.

It was my first instinct to call her. I'm not sure why I did that. Maybe I was searching for verification that this event had actually occurred, or maybe an explanation of why it did, or maybe I just wanted to discuss it with her, I don't know. I was simply reacting to the situation.

The ensuing conversation was very short and one-sided,  mostly consisting of me hopelessly struggling to form coherent sentences that communicated to her how I felt. This was particularly difficult at the time because in my shocked stupor my vocabulary had withered to about 10 words, 5 of which were different variations of "uh".

After continually failing to convey any sort of meaningful message, the call ended with an empty-hearted goodbye. I slowly walked back to the classroom, still in a daze. I got back to my seat, sat down, and aimed a glassy-eyed stare at my computer screen. I remember feeling like language had failed me, not the other way around. I sat there dimly trying to formulate an articulate conclusion that would simplify the shitball of emotions swirling around inside me. I just sat there, doing nothing but spinning my mental tires in the proverbial mud.

In a similar fashion to Tom Hanks shooting vainly at that tank at the very end of Saving Private Ryan, I pulled up MS paint and decided to make a comic parodying my current mental and emotional state, just for shits and giggles. It was like I was facing a task so insurmountable that the only thing I could do was to shrug and laugh at it. So that's essentially what I did.

I boiled things down to a metaphorical block puzzle, like the kind you might see at a day care or a lab where they do tests on monkeys and shit. But this particular puzzle was impossible. No matter how hard the person (those black lines are supposed to be arms and hands) in the comic tries, the square block isn't going to fit into the circular hole. They don't know what to do. It reflected my outlook on the situation: it wasn't that I just hadn't found the answer yet, it was that there was no answer.

She was gone, and there was nothing I could do to "fix" that.

After a minute or two of artistic nit-picking (note how professionally the blocks are shaded), I felt a powerful need to share this little creation of mine. It was like I thought I would feel better if enough people saw the comic and understood the sentiment it contained. I posted it on my facebook, but in doing so made it seem much more comedic than it actually was. I added the caption "If only I tried to realize the truth - there is no block", like it was supposed to be some Matrix reference or something. It was a weak attempt at using humor to throw up some defensive walls to obfuscate the perception from reality. To protect myself.

Understandably, nobody "got" it. It has received the most underwhelming response out of all my comics to date, and in that sense it was a failure. But in a different sense (unknown at the time) it was a great success. The process of creation itself had been far more enjoyable than I was expecting. In the past, I had enjoyed writing short blurbs and poetry, but both tended to be either relatively boring or vague and difficult to relate to (read: extra boring). This new thing seemed like a cool, unexplored medium for expression. Something more fun for both the creator and the reader.

That day I went on a comic micro-rampage, entirely oblivious to what had happened earlier. I was just enjoying drawing and thinking about what to draw and what I could turn into a drawing. I posted what I made to facebook. I liked the responses I got, and that was the day I started taking greater note of funny little bite-sized thoughts that I sometimes got. The kinds of thoughts that I might laugh to myself about, I now wanted to preserve and convert to comic format so that others might laugh about them too. My comics quickly expanded from being purely comedic to a variety of flavors. They became a great outlet of expression, and making them was a blast.

I have seen (hur hur) what a picture can do to help tell a story or convey an idea, but sometimes you just need words too. Using facebook as an expressive platform was like trying to do a puppet show through a peep hole, it's just too limiting by nature. So I've created this blog to try to help bridge the gap between the mediums. To help convert the latent thoughts I have sitting around into something more tangible, and share them in the hopes that people will enjoy them as much as I did.


In conclusion, this is the first story in the 'I told you that story so I could tell you this one' saying. This is the prelude to chapter 1 (chapter 1 being that silly picture way up top).

I hope you liked it and will stick around and enjoy the ride! This is only the beginning!