To start with, here’s the first page of a silent comic I drew recently. It’s very short, but it might be the first completely textless comic I’ve ever made.
This summer hasn’t been light on work, exactly, but it has been very, very light on text. I’m a little disturbed to say so, because I’m starting a creative writing MFA program in less than three weeks, and where are my words? Even my attempts at journal entries (not a thing I’m historically any good at, but nonetheless a thing I’m currently attempting) tend to run something along the lines of “I don’t know what to write, today.” Which is no doubt an evasion of what I don’t want to say, but nevermind that for the moment.
Earlier in the year, when I gave myelf a tri-weekly posting deadline, I fully intended that it should include long text posts as well as art – proper essays, even – but none of that materialized. Instead, everything I wrote felt forced, in tone and in content, and no amount of editing or revision seemed to fix it.
I suppose, in retrospect, I was pumping breath into a corpse (pardon the macabre analogy. The silent comic was probably enough). Hchom was so much fun to work on in its heyday, I wanted to keep it up forever; but it was also a creature of an another era, belonging to a different Marian, and now it’s time to let it go.
I will, of course, start another site. I’ve had a personal website in some form or other since the year 2000, so I’m like that weird hermit living in the catacombs, and you know I’m too deep to ever escape. But I’ll take some time before I launch it in full, to figure out what sort of creature I’ll be hatching next, and to let the word-hoard open on its own.
In the meantime I’ll use something else – Instagram, probably – as a bridge, and I’ll make sure to post a link before I hit the red button. It also occurs to me that taking Hchom down from the internet might be a good opening to collect its content into a proper book, so I’ll look into that with real intent.
Allow me to say, to all of you who visited and posted here throughout the history of the site: you are just the best people ever. Thank you so much for being willing to engage with me in all my various, often ridiculous topics. It was a fucking honor, you guys, for serious.
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