Ed-ucation (Patreon)

Between Failures is sort of a strange mish mash of fictionalized autobiography and, at the time of starting it, 30 years of being an artist.  Edward is a character that I have drawn, in one form or another, since I was 7 or 8.  Originally he was called Weird Ed and had his eyeballs perpetually protruding cartoonishly from his face.  At that time he had a costar named Cool Fred.  Give me a break, I was 7.  There was a 3rd character named Booger Moe.  As you can see, my naming convention was Adjective First Name for basically everyone.  I made up tales for these 3 characters for several years before growing out of the Madballs style of comedy that was popular at the time of their creation.  

At that time I reimagined Ed as basically a normal person.  Fred and Moe disappeared to wherever abandoned characters go.  This was around the time that I encountered Ranama 1/2 for the first time and the idea of a high school where people fight all the time, with magic powers, enthralled me.  So Ed got dropped into a world like that.  Before that point he just sort of existed in an unpopulated place where people just said gross jokes periodically and stopped existing when the camera panned away.  This new thing was an early foray into actual writing with plot and characterizations.  It basically went nowhere because I didn't have the tools to take it anywhere, and no one could teach me.  

American culture doesn't value comics the way some others do, so we don't really have the infrastructure to create more comic artists. They just basically have to become it themselves via pure determination.  Maybe you have a school for art in a metropolitan area, but certainly not in the Midwest.  There wasn't really anyone for me to look to for support.  When I did have art classes in school I was actively discouraged from pursuing cartooning.  In fairness, looking back, in my estimation, I don't really have innate talent for it.  I am a decent writer but my art skills have always been weak, at least compared to other artists.  So for many years I ended up studying sculpting.  Strangely enough my sculptures tended to end up looking like my drawings though.  I could sculpt a passable human face, with effort, however.  

Ed languished in the background for these years, but never totally vanished. Eventually, after I had some life under my belt, the things that happened to me that inspired Between failures began to congeal into something more recognizable. At first I tried to slot in avatars of people I actually worked with, but it soon became apparent that that wouldn't work in the long run.  So I needed original characters to slot into those vacant positions.  Ed was one of them who happened to be right there when I had need.  

Once that was settled everything began to fall into place.  I basically took all those years of his real backstory and made them into something that would make sense in the world of Between Failures.  The most obvious thing is that his father is the principal of an area high school.  It is implied that Edward got into a lot of fights.  He was a short, strange, outcast.  He's also kind of an anchor to a past version of myself.  

Very few images of Ed from before the comic survived into the modern era, but since I've been cleaning up my world I ran across a few.  My art style has changed, but you can see bits that came with me right up till today.  Anyway, since I've been so caught up in real life the posts have been sparse.  For that I apologize, as I often do.  I hope this post is at least somewhat interesting.  

Jessica and John are probably the next oldest characters that exist in the comic now.  The were both introduced during the battle school days.  Arguably Wes also comes from that time.  Nina existed in sort of a proto form but really a totally different character I lifted a handful of elements from. I don't know how likely it is for me to ever find any of those old drawings, but I'll let you know.