Celebrating The Red Muscle (Patreon)

It's been 5 years since The Red Muscle's first chapter was posted and although it's still on a hiatus at the moment, I wanted to take the time to reflect on what this series has meant to me. I talked a bit about where the characters and basic premise came from in my last post, but I also want to talk a little bit about my history with comics and how Red Muscle fits in. To properly give the series the context it needs, I'll have to talk about some of my older stuff for a bit so bear with me.

I've been making small comics ever since I was a little kid but it was mostly just channeling the humor of the Garfield comics I would pick up at book fairs, starting with comics about my pets and then moving onto game parodies or random fantasy inspired things. I've technically been crafting jokes for a long time but my storytelling ability was always lacking. Not that you expect much out of kids to create a compelling narrative, but I was sort of locked in at that skill level for years and didn't do much to improve my writing.

Around middle school and beginning puberty I started wanting to draw a lot of female characters and eventually tell romance stories but I was always an awkward kid without much knowledge about any of that besides what I saw in anime (I was such a nasty little anime child in general, sorry to those who knew me back then). I had formed some characters that I liked drawing and I mostly focused on just the art side of things until I had eventually created both Ami and Frankie and I would draw some really cheesy romantic comics.

I didn't really know what my voice was at the time. I didn't know how to channel my sense of humor, which was one of my strong suits in my social life, into the romantic art I was pursuing. I think that's the biggest reason I couldn't leave all my old comics up, they felt like they weren't representative of the entire me, only the embarrassing parts that I was exploring in my art and my fumbled attempts at "funny". I don't think I'll upload much of the old stuff for a while longer, but making this post does make me feel like I should at least share some pages throughout the years for context. Against my better judgement, here's just a FEW old things I've made a year out of high school (2012):

I was getting a bit better by 2014:

I could make some short little funny things but writing an actual story was still very challenging and I felt really stagnant with my art for a long time and could never get myself to finish any of my ideas. I eventually got inspired by Miyata Kouji's manga and started a story that was just pure indulgence, essentially boiling down to a cute character with a nice figure that would wear a sexy bodysuit that would let me draw cool poses. I know who I am and what I like! haha. That was the first Red Muscle pilot which was fun and I felt good about what I learned (this is now around 2016).

Shortly after this, I started a much longer story idea that felt like my first time telling something more involved; It was about a small farm girl named Kahlia who was the secret lovechild from a love affair between her own late mother and the king who had met her when he was still a young bumbling prince. Kahlia had to seek out the king's aid when a mysterious comet crashes down and destroys her home, leaving her orphaned and alone. It was a cool idea but I struggled beyond the setup and ran out of steam drawing it:

I remember feeling like I was in between so many ideas and I wasn't getting anything done! I had Kahlia's story,

I had a wrestler named Sugar that I gave up on the year before,

I had kept trying to use my character Rasbi in something,

I had tried to continue the thought process of being indulgent and do a blatant Zelda inspired thing with a girl character named Margot who would later turn into a drummer for a COOL game idea I'd still like to do some day (second image drawn by Mariel),

I just couldn't get anywhere with these ideas for one reason or another, so I ended up returning to The Red Muscle.

I had just made the pilot and felt comfortable calling it complete, it was something I had proven to myself that I could do. I started by redesigning things first but would bump my head against the wall trying to form a coherent story off the scraps of what I had set up initially. I had set some limitations for myself on the art side that would make drawing the comic easier, like having no gutter usage at all. I've since used the time in between chapters to study manga layouts and I've talked about it a bit here, but at the time I needed to just be able to get some layouts done and couldn't worry about the artistry of the comic page as a whole entity so I told myself that everything needed to stay simple so that I could spend more time learning to write.

I was extremely self conscious about my writing and my ability to ideate and had to ask Mariel for feedback after every little addition and ask where she thought it could go next. I love her to death for continuing to spitball ideas at me for a story she didn't care too much about and my indecisive self would always push back about it not feeling right, but she continued to help me anyways. She's just as responsible for getting the comic off the ground as I was and gave shape to a lot of the big picture plans too. I should have done so from the start but to respect her contributions to my comic, I made sure her name was on every cover and info page (not even accounting for her drawing chapter 5 because she also wanted to practice making comics too). 

The Red Muscle was an idea born out of aesthetics that I had no particular attachment to and that REALLY tested my creativity all throughout making the comic. It will probably be an issue for me until the story is complete because I am constantly rubbing up against the idea of making a "superhero" story, I usually tell friends that I fucking HATE superheroes and yet here I am, making a story about a girl in a power ranger suit. I've never really cared too much about pursuing really flashy and creative visuals or symbolic powers that are the strong suit of the genre. I've also flipped from not caring about any common hero storytelling tropes to feeling like "maybe I should just make a good one of those" after watching Spiderverse, and back and forth a few more times after. I guess I shouldn't explain out what I want to do with the rest of the comic but I've started pushing towards a direction that has a longer term goal starting around chapter 7:

As I've drawn up the story, the small changes I've made from my initial plans have all been leading into this new direction, and maybe it would be fun to give an example. Chapter 4 was a big pivot point from what I first wrote to what ended up on the final pages.

It was initially a chapter about Scarlet needing to buy Edgar a gift for his birthday and she tries to go in disguise to an Anime Convention that Edgar attends with his friends, ultimately getting kicked out because she saw someone that looked like a Guppy and started rampaging in one of the halls. I ended up tweaking things and adding some characters to have Scarlet hang out with, one of them being Camille. After that chapter was done I immediately had a lot of new ideas for Scarlet and Camille to do together. Having Scarlet form more friendships from a common love of anime became more interesting that just the basic super suit training mishaps and Ula fighting. Camille will be more present in the story in the future, but then adding Ricki into the mix pushed those ideas back. I had the idea of an inventor ex-girlfriend right at the beginning and she wasn't going to be recurring, but I think Ricki became such a cool character that now I have a lot of ideas for Ricki too!! It's really gotten out of hand but I think there's a lot of fun stuff to do with the 3 ladies that will be fun to get into some day.

There are ideas that I had from the very beginning that I've wanted to do forever and they keep getting pushed back because new ideas pop up that make the story better before I get there, but I'm so close to getting to a big Edgar one! It's interesting to have such a loose plan, every chapter informs me of what I can do that's so much better than the ideas I had before. I think I look back and do feel a bit sad about how little story I've actually gotten through in the 5 years, but considering I spent a lot of time making Weekend With Yuka all by myself I have to live with being only at chapter 8. Mariel even offered to help draw chapter 8 early into me making WWY and started some layouts but I've developed a much stronger vision in my head of how Red Muscle pages flow and started overediting her ideas. It made more sense to take a break from my graphic novel to just knock it out myself.

The Red Muscle is such a bizarre concept when you do the elevator pitch, some nerds make a super suit and become mortal enemies of a fish woman who also runs a huge business? There's no clear direction to take a story like that but I think Red Muscle has been my place to really experiment and try things that just feel most fun to me without worrying about making an airtight crafted narrative. It's taught me a lot about writing which I've used to make Exposure, and then I bring that back into Red Muscle which then helped me develop Weekend With Yuka. I've found out what I want and don't want to do with Red Muscle. I want to push for more adult stuff on the relationship side, which doesn't necessarily mean there's going to be like explicit sex scenes, rather it can be another extension of some characters building relationships that affect the story at large. Sometimes it's nice to get some nudity in the mix and let characters have physical intimacy, especially when it has purpose. I promise I can make it natural and hopefully my other works will sell you on my vision.

I've had a lot of times while working on new stories recently that I've maybe felt unappreciative of this comic, or maybe that it's been easy to forget about because nowadays I have a better understanding of what I want to create. I've learned so much over these 5 years and I want to test myself and see what comes out when I can use my current skills all the way at the beginning stages of something new, something more unique to myself. Whatever comes out might end up being better comics when all is said and done, but Red Muscle is where I developed my voice. I think maybe this would feel a bit more impactful when you get to read through everything I've written for this comic already. My drafts are sitting all the way at like... chapter 13 or 14 (not even counting if I have to split some of these into parts like ch6-8). Hopefully when WWY is done I can develop a faster pace of drawing chapters without huge breaks in between.

For now, I hope you at least appreciate this illustration of the Red Muscle cast doing a fun routine at a football game. It was really fun to draw! I've been trying to push myself to do stronger compositions and also get more comfortable with text and typography, so hopefully it shows.

That's all for now, see you guys next post! Whenever I get back to drawing Red Muscle the next chapter will be an Ula focused one!