Johnny Wander Retrospective - 1 (Patreon)

Hey! I've decided to start a retrospective of our comics, all the way from the beginning. Who knows if I can keep it going! We'll see what happens. Anyway. Yuko and I have been collaborating for over ten years now and it's always been a process of moving on to the next thing, with very little time to reflect. 

The short history: we started working on Johnny Wander in 2008, and the first comics went up in 2009. We were living in Maryland with Conrad and John at the time, and Conrad helped us build our original site (the new one is by Hiveworks). It was totally custom and really robust. It can't be underscored enough-- Conrad building the website really helped us get Johnny Wander off the ground. Thank you, Conrad!

At the time, we were developing a fantasy comic (you can see some of the dev work in CUTTINGS). The plan was to 1. do autobio comics on the side 2. while we did freelance to pay the bills 3. while also developing a fantasy comic about these characters:

As I'm sure is apparent, the fantasy comic never happened. The autobio comics ended up really resonating with people! Pretty cool. We clung to this fantasy comic for years, and didn't truly shelve it until we finished Lucky Penny and were in the period of planning that would ultimately lead to Barbarous. 

Anyway, that's a story for another post. I think the big lesson we learned was that you can spend all the time you want planning something, but the thing you do is the thing you do. 

Let's talk about that. 

This was the first page of Johnny Wander: 

Yuko wrote the original poem, and then we kicked it back and forth. I think the treatment was my idea... I wanted it to look like it was xeroxed out of an old book. This proved pretty effective– we still get asked what book these poems originated from. 

Actually, we get asked about these poem pages a lot (there's one poem at the beginning of each volume). What's the deal with them? The answer is we didn't want to box ourselves into one kind of comic, and this was a way to insert some whimsy and open the door to breaking format. Johnny Wander was always meant to be an umbrella for all of our comics, and we wanted to establish that in some way right from the outset. 

The bird! The bird is a maw, which is like a magical crow with a big mouth in its belly. 

They're weird little creatures that Yuko came up with in college– they show up in the background or as logos in all of our comics, just as a little thread to connect our work. If you'd told me we'd some day have a Maw plush, I'd have laughed. For some reason, looking at them always makes me think of the manga Bleach. Probably because Yuko and I first bonded over making things together, and also Bleach? Idk, it's been a minute.

Don't expect all of these posts to be so long! I'm setting the stage here but I'll be focusing more on particular pages as I do more of these.