Author: skiddykid

A local wizard risen from the deep woods to study literature, think about writing, and make narrative comics about boys lost in those selfsame woods.

Basil + Gideon #6: A Little Break

skiddykid Leave a comment

Hope everyone had a relaxing break, and if not I hope you can absorb some of the restful vibes from this comic. Besides giving my lads a chance to chill, I was excited about this page because I wanted to make it a bit more explicit that both of them are trans men. As a trans person myself it’s important to me to represent and normalize trans bodies in media, because we exist and we deserve to see reflections of ourselves in the world! Of course, Basil and Gideon aren’t representational of all trans masc people, but they’re a little bit of what I’d like to have seen when I was growing up and figuring out gender.

 

Basil + Gideon #5: Hamlet

skiddykid Leave a comment

The funny thing about the “To be or not to be” speech (which is the one Basil is supposed to be giving here) is that it’s too iconic. In my Shakespeare class we discussed how it can be difficult to understand this speech as both an actor and as a reader/viewer because it’s so famous, it’s lost its meaning. In a way “to be” has come to stand as an icon for the entire play. However, Oscar Wilde once said that “there are as many Hamlet’s as there are melancholies”. Which I take to mean that you have to take your own experience with melancholy to your reading of Hamlet and then Hamlet becomes more legible because he is part of you.

Basil + Gideon is an ongoing narrative comic, if this is your first time reading check out the first installment here!

Basil + Gideon #4: Fairytale?

skiddykid Leave a comment

 

I love stories about fairies. The combination of mischievousness and selfishness make them very fun characters to work with! Fairy/Fae lore is also super interesting because fairies have their own set of laws that they operate under and if any mortal wants to interact with fairies it has to be by their rules. The concept of a group of people who on one hand are hedonistic and manipulative, but simultaneously are strictly rule driven fascinates me.

Basil + Gideon is an ongoing narrative comic, if this is your first time reading check out the first installment here!

Basil + Gideon #3: Spooky Season is Over??

skiddykid Leave a comment

Happy belated Halloween!

I wanted to try my hand at drawing something spooky since I’ve never done anything along the lines of a horror comic before. To do a bit of writerly reflection on the horror genre: to me it seems horror is an exaggerated management of rate of revelation. Horror tends to carefully balance the knowledge afforded to the audience to draw them into the climactic scare at which point the audience understands what they should be scared of and, hopefully, the story is all the scarier for it. What’s worse: the unknown horrors or the horrible truth?

Basil + Gideon is an ongoing narrative comic, if this is your first time reading check out the first installment here!

Basil + Gideon #2: These woods, they are a-cursed

skiddykid Leave a comment

Does everyone else have the urge to escape real life by running away to the woods, or is that just me? Forests in fairytales (and in a lot of western literary tradition) are where society ends and wilderness begins. They’re dangerous places full of witches and wolves, where anything can happen. But I think that if society has a hard time finding a place for you, the wilderness can sound pretty good.

Basil + Gideon is an ongoing narrative comic, if this is your first time reading check out the first installment here!

Basil + Gideon: Some people hate endings…

skiddykid Leave a comment

I hate beginnings.

Hey all, welcome to this on going comic series about two lads lost in the woods. I went back and forth on how to start this story for forever. But one of the cool things about comics and about writing in general is that there really are no rules (some folks might tell you there are, but you don’t need to follow them). If I want to, I can introduce my setting with a welcome to town sign and I can have one of my main characters fall off a train to get into said setting, and isn’t that the fun of it?