Author notes

Page 385: Redemption

El Cid

on May 3, 2013

 

 

 

 
Just one page to go! I'm not entirely sure what all to write as an epitaph to this schizo monster of a comic, and since I suppose the last update will be all about final credits, I wanted to say something meaningful or illuminating here. I think for the most part, Death P*rn doesn't require much explanation. It began life as an eight page "shocker" mini-comic, and from there evolved into a slightly bigger "Xtreme horror" type sludgefest, and from there finally got transformed into an actual story that ended up running just shy of four hundred pages. I certainly didn't plan for it to run this long and this big, but it was one of those occasions when I just chose to trust my creative muse and, at times against my better judgment, follow the wave wherever it took me.
 
I generally don't think artists need to come out and explain or justify all of the influences and objectives behind what they've created, so I won't do that here. For the most part, this comic hasn't received much in the way of direct criticism, which I'm not sure is a good or a bad thing, but the one complaint I have heard frequently is that the narrative was sloppy, or weak, or something else along those lines. I'll admit that there were definitely some plot issues that came out of this not initially being conceived as a long-term project, however much of the wonkiness was intentional. I did to some extent want the comic to feel unstructured, and toyed with a few conventions. I did intentionally aim to mock tropes like the big showdown between good and evil, and the hero rescuing the damsel in distress, among other things, and generally tried (not always with success) to avoid the artificially tidy cause-and-effect framework we see so much of in fiction but so little of in life. Despite all that, I still thought the stories were easy enough to follow, and you can mostly still look at both the characters' mini-narratives and the overall plot traditionally anyway, so on the whole I feel good about the way everything turned out.
 
Wow, I wrote a lot more than I'd anticipated there. Okay, that's all for today. Come back next week, for the final page! You know you want to. It's like the dead body of an evil dictator; it has to be publicly viewed so everyone can breathe a sigh of relief!