I’m gonna be honest here and say that the request for this week’s column has been a little more than awkward. I don’t have anything to really say, since nothing’s really been going on in my head besides my personal and professional (read: academic) life. But, having just finished drawing my latest strip, I figure that, since Critical Hit! is essentially a comic column these days, I should talk a little about my own comic, Sunny-Side Up, and how it came to be.

Sunny-Side Up is basically a boy-meets-girl story, and it’s designed to be just as tumultuous as those meetings can typically be. It’s sort of pseudo-autobiographical only in the sense though that I, like a lot of other guys in this world, met a girl that rocked my world. I just happened to be one of the few that decided to detail those events in the form of a story. So, the comic is essentially my series of unfortunate events, because they’re the only ones I’m familiar with.

From the get-go, the story was never really designed to be very happy. Like life, it’s supposed to be bittersweet. The arc that it’s in right now was where I’ve always wanted the story to end up when I first started writing it, as it was the only thing I could ever think about. I admit that the point was to be unabashedly self-pitying. I mean, the way I saw it, I didn’t want to be held back by rejection and embarrassment forever, and I figured the best way I could ever get over it was by publicizing it. Hence, the birth of the comic.

Here’s the thing: whether any of us would like to admit it or not, we all want to feel significant. We all have something to say, and we’re always looking for ways to be heard. I’m no different. I had just been stripped of my dignity, and, dammit, I wanted someone to fucking listen to me. I wanted to bitch and moan — I wanted to be pitied. But since everyone has their own problems to worry about, nobody really gives a shit. Not even friends. So what’s a guy to do? Obviously, make everyone else care.

Fiction, I’ve come to realize, is basically one of the many ways of making a lot people care about trivial shit, mostly personal. I’ve learned that, if you make your problems sound interesting enough, chances are, people are going to listen. So the tricky thing about fictionalizing my own personal events was trying to make them interesting. You can’t just start with the drama — that’s stupid. You have to ease into it. You gotta make the people care about your characters first. Then, as soon as they’re getting cozy with them, you start taking it up a notch. Once you have them in a good place, BANG! You kick ’em in the ass with the dramatic tension. It’s what I did with the comic.

I started writing the story Winter Quarter of last year; I decided that I was gonna end it Spring Quarter of this year. This gave me five quarters to tell the story. I spent the first two quarters trying to get people interested in the characters or, at least, to give people a reason to look forward to it every week. I mean, I understand that there are some consistent readers in the school, so I figured the continuity of the story would be their little treat. Once the third quarter rolled around, Fall Quarter of this year, that’s when I started cranking it up a notch. I got it to be super sentimental.

The point of the overt sentimentality was to exaggerate the emotions. If the emotions were exaggerated enough, then the drop would feel just as significant. That’s the idea, anyways. I wanted people to feel that uneasy, cutesy feeling that they so despise so that, when it’s at its most dispicable, I can fuck it up and really make people care. The goal was for people to pity these characters.

That’s about what’s happening now. Or supposed to be, anyways. To be honest, I’m significantly less angsty than I was a year ago, and, actually, sorta resent drawing it. The only reason I still do it is to prove that I can commit to something. I mean, I still think it’s kinda cool. But I’d really like to be done with it and move on. I dunno, my opinions on it are up in the air.

I will say, though, that the comic is supposed to be hopeful. I mean, it’s not so obvious now, since it’s at a very shitty place, but it was never supposed to be just bitter. Like the title, it’s supposed to be very “Look on the bright side.” It still has a quarter and a half to go, and, in that span, I want both those characters to come out of it being very different people. For better or worse. That’s sorta how it is in real life anyways, so why shouldn’t my cutesy, fictional characters be any different?

I have nothing more to say. If you want to follow along with the story, you can catch the comic in its entirety at www.PHRHIEDOM.com.