On WICKED THINGS/CIRCUS WINDOWS process post

I hope you are enjoying (or if you are a $3/month patron, have enjoyed) Circus Windows. In this post I will take you through the thinking behind it, the background to it, and some of my sketches for it.

After Wicked Things was cancelled, I was in a bit of a bind. I say "cancelled", let's just say, if it had been more successful, there would have been more than six issues. That's life. We can lay the blame at the foot of the pandemic, the punishing direct market conditions for indie series, or me for writing a series set around law enforcement in the year of "defund the police". In the end, it was the wrong series at the wrong time. I can't blame anyone else who worked on it - their work was, as even untrained eyes will tell you, top-drawer. 

In my (weak) defence, if I had known it was only getting six issues when I was writing it, I wouldn't have written it anything like I did. It was designed as a procedural, like a US TV show, to run and run, and be fun. My model was The Mentalist. I had 16 more issues of plots ready to go, which now seems ludicrously over-confident. I stretched out, when I should have made myself small. I think they were good comics, though, I'm proud of them. 

It does take me a while to work out how to make something work properly and I don't think I can do that on company time in the current climate.

But in the wake of this snack-sized failure, one thing did not waver, my fondness for Charlotte Grote, who I think is my best character. I snarled her up in a bad-tempered series crammed with plot intrigue, and served her poorly. Lottie needs a stage on which to showboat and she seldom got one in Wicked Things. Circus Windows is my attempt to make amends for that. She starts off diminished, and ends puffed up back to her original size. 

Wicked Things wasn't easy to write, and Charlotte had always been easy and fun to write before, which should have been a clue that I was pushing in the wrong direction. I can usually hear her contrarian voice in my head, but I lost it in that set-up and had to fight to find it. The good news was, as soon as I started writing Circus Windows, it switched straight back on.

Everything started with pencil and paper. Drawing the characters helps me get in touch with them.

[There was one more page of notes but it spoils the end so I'll save it for a couple of weeks.]

I just scrawled it out over the course of a day. The story doesn't have many moving parts, it's a two-hander with Mildred and Lottie getting to know one another again. The "case" is thin because Mildred just came up with it off the top of her head - it only becomes a thing because Lottie pokes it.  

I tidied those notes up, pacing it out to make two 22-page "issues" - room for action and plot as well as lots of character stuff. I break my notes down neatly,  page-by-page - this is as important a stage as scripting, as I can juggle things much more easily. My breakdown for pt1 is attached at the end as a PDF.

When I'm writing for myself, I don't type, I just write and draw the comic out in my notebook, paying attention to double-page spreads, because maybe someone will want to print this one day.

As you can see, I have to be fairly nippy about drawing these, as certain things increasingly resemble hieroglyphs as time goes on and I lose my ability to divine what on earth I was on about.

Circus Windows represents , in a sense, a return to core principles. I didn't want to make a new comic set in Tackleford, but I had no option but to send Lottie back to the safety of home - for good or ill. I didn't want to make a new Bad Machinery comic, but she needs a foil, and Mildred came with the least historical baggage. 

But the long and short of it was that it's been a shitty year and it has been nice to spend the last few months of it at the drawing board with a friend.

There's more Charlotte in "Author Unknown", her Steeple crossover, but I'll talk more about that soon. I think they're some of my best ever comics, I'm excited for you to see them. 

Thanks for reading!