HESSYST BEGINS.

I can hardly believe it.  I am FINALLY (after all these years talking and dreaming about it) able to share HESSYST with you.  It’s been an incredibly long road made of twists, turns, full stops, and re-imaginings—but we’re actually here now. There is still so much further I want to go with it, but getting to this point means the world to me and I want to celebrate with this little write up. This is essentially a “why I think you should really consider doing that thing that you’ve always wanted to do and keep coming back to in spite of yourself” kind of post. Everyone knows a few people with ‘passion projects’, but few people know many who have succeeded in the pursuit of such things.

I have wanted to tell stories like this since I was about seven years old, and I’ve been trying to figure it all out ever since.   From taking folded printer paper and drawing like a demon in middle and high school, to obsessively studying fables and world mythologies for inspiration, I have been feverishly seeking ways to tell my stories and share them with others in a way that made sense and didn’t suck.

I spent most of my early years being my own worst critic and preventing myself from starting time and time again because I always found some reason to believe “I wasn’t there yet.” or I hadn’t met “x-y-z condition”. My art wasn’t where I wanted it to be or I wasn’t a skilled-enough writer and I was sure that one day, maybe I could be. Well, ‘one day’ never really comes and if you want to make something like this, you really do just have to start. You will likely mess up a lot. Do I still hate some of the panels I make? Sure, a lot of them. Do I still have days where I completely screwed everything up? Yup. Is the dream still there regardless of how I feel on any given day? Yeah, it is. The best part is that the more ground I cover, the faster I get and the more I like what I’m making. I felt as I was about halfway through volume one that I truly, finally understood what it means to love the journey in this context, and not get hung up on making some grand piece of effortless beautiful art.

Back in the early 2010’s, I found myself in a bad situation of my own making and had to choose to abandon the dream entirely or find a way to get paid for it. Fortunately, the umbrella field of ‘concept art and illustration’ provided a branch for me to grab onto and both study and paint things related to the world I’d been creating. I kept trying to plan this monster; kept looking for a way to get closer to it.  Even after years of hearing the advice, “You just have to start.” over and over again in so many ways, for one reason or another I felt that I couldn’t get there or that the road was blocked, and it was infuriating.

So what changed?

As it turns out, making a graphic novel is hard.  Veteran artists with all the chops in the world will tell you that making a graphic novel or other sequential narrative is hard.  It remains one of the biggest mountains in the field of entertainment art, and the rewards for attempting to, or even successfully scaling it can be meager at best; it certainly isn’t for the $$$ and other artists won’t really care about what you’re making either.  However, there are still many who find themselves getting lost in a comic book now and then and long to create one; there are those who have treasured memories of reading a visual novel and recalling exactly where they were in their lives when they did so. It’s one of the oldest art forms and I think that is why it retains such a resonance for some.

For me personally, I have always found a kind of ‘resonance’ for certain picture books and graphic novels, despite not necessarily being the most avid reader of the medium in general myself.  I was not the kid with stacks of comics in my collection.  I was the kid who every once in a while, was charmed by a chance encounter with the right one. I believe in my case this was because it was never about making a single painting or drawing; it was about finding an idea and bringing something to life. 

While I do hope that HESSYST manages to be one of those resonant stories for a young (or old) reader today, I now find that my primary inspiration to get on with it is my newborn son.  I know I can’t make predictions like this, but I hope that he will find something special to connect or relate to in the struggles my characters will face as I continue to encode little bits of my life and experiences for him to uncover.

I suppose all in all, there was a time when I had to take a hard look at where I was in my life and where I still needed to go. Lamenting this once, I had a friend tell me to just wait until I was older; until I had lived more and had more things to say. I took the advice literally and spent the next three years doing just that, without drawing or painting very much at all. When a bit of good fortune finally found me and I had the sense to take it, I did what I could to pay it forward or keep whatever lessons led me to it close to heart.  When you have a dream--and I mean a real dream that persists for longer than a decade or more--you have to find a way.  Believe whatever you need to believe to accept that you cannot compromise, or it will continue to irritate you.  Look for meaning in unusual places and strive to carve out your own path.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. I’ll have updates for Volume 2 and the printed book eventually. Until then, see you.