In a way, this chapter represents the perils of doing a comic with an ongoing story arc. This is a chapter I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s been running around in my head ever since I saw Cloverfield in theaters a couple of years ago. However, at that point (I believe I was in the midst of chapter 6 or 7), I had already planned out the rest of book one, and could not work a Cloverfield parody into it. So I set it on the shelf for a while, and worked it into book two. The downside to this was that Cloverfield has gotten stale by now. But if I didn’t let that stop me from making a Casino Royale parody, I certainly wasn’t going to let it stop this.
Part of the reason I wanted to do this arc was because Cloverfield and other movies that use first person perspective intrigue me. Even The Blair Witch Project’s style of storytelling was interesting to me, though the movie itself was a turd. It’s also a much older practice than people think with Lady in the Lake (1947) being the first example I can think of (or at least the earliest that I’ve personally seen). I wanted to try to replicate this in comic form, and a Cloverfield parody seemed like a good excuse to do it. It was a fun challenge, but I know I didn’t entirely succeed. Although I’m getting better at perspective drawings and drawing my characters at odd angles, I know there’s some times in this chapter they looked off model. There were also some camera angles (particularly in both scenes Cartoon Billy shows up) that the person holding the camera could not possibly have gotten.
I think the experiment would have worked better as an animation, and I in fact did consider animating it briefly, but time constraints and the future inability to put the chapter in books prevented this. The advantage that film in first person has over comics in first person is that motion and sound can be used to show what’s going on, whereas with a comic, all I had to work with were visuals. As a result, I sometimes had to pick clarity of image over a realistic camera angle so the audience would know what was happening. And conversations that took place off camera were incredibly difficult. Not only did I have to make it clear who was talking to who, but I had to make sure their word balloons didn’t obscure what the camera was focusing on, which was usually important. I do wish I had looked for some comics done in first person, instead of depending solely on movies. That would have really helped.
The story, I think, went slightly better. I feel this is one of the better parodies I’ve done in a while, and I think I did a good job of paying homage to Cloverfield while also mocking some of its more questionable moments. I chose Vyona to be the monster because, as I said at the start of the chapter, she hasn’t gotten to do much since she became a main character. Also, in most cartoons where a character becomes a giant, unless the character’s evil (which isn’t a direction I wanted to go with this parody), the character has to be dim, naïve, and/or clumsy in order to pose an actual threat. The destruction they cause is either by accident, or because they think the city’s a toy, or something like that. The only other characters that really fit this were Booker (who I didn’t use because it’d be too much like that crappy Honey I Blew Up the Kid movie) or Bobbes (who just had his own chapter). So it became obvious pretty quickly that this was going to be Vyona’s role, as she’s just ditzy and clumsy enough to create some havoc.
My biggest regret with the story was the hormone excuse. Originally, that was going to be Vyona’s reason for going nuts and destroying the town, but I realized, pretty quickly, that this was kind of sexist. Then I remembered that Vyona’s brainwashed to attack Connor on sight, and decided to use that as her excuse instead, which I think makes great foreshadowing for some events I have planned later. Unfortunately, I didn’t come up with that until the page explaining the growth hormone thing had already gone online, so I was stuck. Nobody’s complained, though, so perhaps I worried too much.
Finally, a note on the ending, which hasn’t gone online at the time I’m writing this, but that I’m sure will irritate at least some people. Let me say this now: I hate it when any form of fiction uses time travel as an easy reset button. And tough as it is to believe, that’s not what I did here.
So anyway, Vyonafield was a huge experiment on my part. Parts of it succeeded, but overall, I think it could have gone much better. But, like all of my mistakes in cartooning, I learned from it, and I like to think I’ll be a better artist for it.
