(From Better You Than Me)
Right here, what’s basically going on is Lee is giving his friend Dave a guest spot for his 21st birthday. Which is awesome, because I’m sure it made Dave’s day. Seeing this comic struck it hard home for me personally, though. As a preface to my piece here, I want to make clear that I’m not trying to promote my comic, but I’m using it and the experiences involved to argue a point and express a feeling. This piece isn’t even really about this comic at all, but it was indeed inspired by it.
Lee’s comic is of a very similar nature to my own. The characters are based on the creator and his everyday friends. Most importantly, a small group of his friends. If Lee’s like me, he probably has friends all over from the internet, back home, in college, at work, etc. Let’s also say that Lee, like me has shown off his comic to his friends. Most, if not all. And they read the comic and he tells them that the characters are him and a couple of his friends and girlfriend.
This scenario leads to one of the most common problems with having a journal comic, or a quasi-journal comic. When your other friends read it, the ones who are not in the comic, they typically say five words. Those five words are iron nails, dipped in cyanide, malleted into my ears.
“Put me in your comic!”
The thing that hurts me most about that is I have to tell them “No”. And I feel guilty. Because it would really make them happy, but I don’t wanna have characters that only appear once just for the sake of appearing. I’ve done that in my earlier stages, but I won’t do it anymore. The comics I do are based on a set group of friends and my (former) roommate. It’s all based on the life view we share, and the ideas we have together. It’s just a thing you have to be a part of. The many other friends I have aren’t in that group, making it so I would be trying to write a fish out of water. It’s a personal policy of mine not to bring in friends for the sake of a one time appearance, unless it has diagetic relevance to the plot.
But it makes me feel guilty. Because some of them are indeed close friends of mine, but I still don’t want to do it. For instance, I have a friend. Let’s call her “Ms. Scarlet” for the sake of anonymity. Ms. Scarlet is a dear friend of mine. She and I have bonded, we share secrets, we’re very close. She came up to me a while ago and said to me, “When are you going to put me in your comic.” I shook my head and said “I’m sorry, but I won’t. Tell me though, why do you want to be in it so badly?” She looked me in the eye and answered, “It’s not that I want to be in it. I deserve to be in it.”
And you know what? She does. We’ve been friends very long, and she’s involved in the group the comic is based on an infrequent, yet meaningful basis. She’s earned her spot in the cast, and I may yet add her. But I still won’t throw her in unless it has some diagetic purpose. That’s just the way I run things, and I think it’s an effective method.
I have a girlfriend also. She’s closer to me than anyone else on this earth. I love her with all my heart and soul, and I’m going to stay with her forever. But I’m not adding my girlfriend to the comic because that’s the number two problem that can sometimes degrade a journal/quasi-journal comic. If you’re like me, you worry a lot about hurting the feelings or otherwise offending people, especially my lady love. And with the seemingly ritualistic abuse and ceaseless mockery I put all my friends’ characterizations through in my comic, that is not something I’d want to do to my gal, even if it is fictional. I’ll admit I let a special occasion like her birthday warrant her a little piece of art of us together instead of a comic, but that’s as far as I’d take it.
Anyway, a major problem with having your lover in your strip is that the things you’d make them say might not always be the things they would actually say. Even when the characters in my comic do some crazy things (like shooting other characters in the head), it still makes sense to who they are. And when you write for a character based on your lover, it will likely be fake because you wouldn’t be writing a characterization of them. You’d be writing a false and tame representation of that person you love so you don’t end up offending them (read: get cut off from sex), upsetting them, or breaking their heart. And no one wants that. Besides, she falls into my first issue of real life character problems anyway, in that she lives no where near my campus (it’s a long distance thing) where all the other characters are based. So she’s not involved in our activities and she’s not a part of the specific group. So having her in the comic would not work well, because to me it just wouldn’t work.
But hey. Everyone can run their comic however they please. And if they can do random guest appearances and honest significant others in their comics, then mad props to them. Lee seems to be holding up just fine doing so. But it just doesn’t work for me.
I’m just sayin’ is all…