BOLVANY (Patreon)

To compensate for the lack of Slavic Nihilism updates I finally decided to do THIS post. All hail Dmitry Nesterak! We're going to look at a ton of sketches from this talented Voronezh fella. And if for some reasons you haven't yet read the story itself - please fix this situation before proceeding further, because I'm going to spoil and explain some of the crucial images from the story.

(And yeah, i know I promised you new Chernobyl strips, but while writing and rewriting second chapter's script I also dug deep into some very interesting books, and now I'm paralyzed by the new ideas flying into my head and threatening to make me rewrite everything even more! So sadly, our sword master will have to wait).

Anyway - let's go!

First, we have our Boy. Dima started bombarding me with his sketches right after we discussed the general story premise and I wrote my murky outline for it (so, it all started exactly a year ago). I love how at first the kid was more of a baby-shaped adult (aesthetically very much in vein of Tarkovsky movies) but later crystallized into a very simple and genuinely childish character.

I think this sheet was actually the very first sketch for Nihilism Dima sent me? Definitely first appearance of what I called "skull-birds" in my script, where they were supposed to plop around in water:

We also had this cat-man hanging out on a tree. I looove this design and want to get back to it sometime in the future, but in our final story Dima ended up using a bunch of little critters instead...  Which actually opposed to be from IUCN Red List. It's impossible to tell by looking at the panel, haha, but with it Dima brought more of touching subtext for our inner talking points.

Also, FLOWERS WITH FACES. I was obsessed with them and pretty much wrote the story exclusively for Dima because of that. At first they appeared in his old and abstract strips (i think? Can't find them because bastard deleted his old Tumblr), and then later we worked together on a cover for Russian comic collection of adapted stories by Andrei Platonov:

And then the biggest challenge for me was the design of bolvany themselves. I was imagining them as literally wooden "columns", closer to more traditional totems, but I also wanted to give them appearance of chorts (Slavic demons).

I gathered a folder of references for Dima, but sadly, those were mostly Slavic pagan gods, and I needed to go full Siberia, for which there was almost no physical artifacts. But they NEEDED to look scary. Alien things made of wood that is at the same time dead and living.

Needless to say... Dima fucking killed it. And also almost killed me, haha. Those are not all the sketches, but I can't find more.

(This is what our layout process looked like. We spend a lot of time tightly planning opening pages together, and then Dima went AWOL, wrecking me with his finished pages).

I mentioned how bolvany almost killed me, and now I'm going to tell you the story.

So, from the very beginning, I wanted to have this weird fucking page. A stilted nine grid with portraits of bolvany in it. A rogues gallery of endless and unexplainable wooden chunks of terror. I wanted for this page to completely break the flow of our story, to make you gaze on it. To understand that the rest of the story doesn't really matter.

After I described it to him, Dima went and nailed the page before doing anything else from the actual story, and I loved it VERY much. I asked him to save this page for me. I was ready to trade my arm for it! He said "eh, I kinda hate it," and I laughed because it sounded silly.

Then, a few months later, comes the day when I get the finished pages scans. And the 9 grid page isn't there.

"Wait. Where's page 11? It's supposed to be there. It's supposed to break the flow of our story and make them understand that yada-yada-yada".

And Dima said: "nah, I ripped it apart. I told you I hated it, but we have some similar panels going on later, it'll be enough".

And I said "You better be joking you moron because I need BOTH PAGES and this is literally the only stand I'm going to make--"

And then this heartthrob sends me this:

I told Dima that I'm actually going to murder him. 

He told me that he hated how alive those monsters looked at the page, and I even understood his point, but still, it was killing me.

Then the motherfucker did a new version of the page overnight. He did it in this flat,  sickly, weird manner, that was standing out from the rest of the story. It was breaking the flo-- WAIT NOW I GET IT.

I don't know if the story makes any sense to you. I don't know if it works the way we intended it to. But I know that so far it's the best completed thing I've ever been a part of, and I only wrote a brief outline for it and made one "stand" that time in the end.

P.S. Also I'm still experiencing the trauma and drawing my versions of them in print copies of #2 from time to time: