Random Xella Babble: First Target

Friday February 16, 2024

When people ask me about my old comic, I usually point them to Second Target as the place to start. There's a reason for that. Several reasons, actually. I try my best to not be too critical of myself (past or present), but this babble's gonna have a lot of that, heh.

First and on the surface level, as we're talking about pages from over twenty years ago at this point the visuals of this chapter just don't hold up. Second Target starts just as weak, but at least has a chance to grow into something a little less shaky. First Target was one of my first forays into actually making comic pages (versus doodling scenes and doing the writing/narration/pacing all in my head) and as a result it's a little all over the place. There's too much text on some pages, not enough on others, the speech bubbles weren't really planned out well, and there are several places (like the very first page) where it's not particularly clear what order the panels should be read in. Understandable mistakes, but the density of them is just so much, y'know? lol

Second, there's a lot of stuff here that reeks of the time it was written and drawn in. When I've dreamed of creating stuff with this story it's always in a moving format first, which means there's sequences that just don't play as well in a static format like a comic as they would in, say, animated form (like Alexus being interrupted by a rock in the face, or the long anime ellipsis between him and the mercs at the end). Not to say that those things can't work in static media, but at sixteen I wasn't really skilled enough to pull most of them off. Also at 16 I thought creating a female character and killing her off explicitly to fuel male suffering or having one of your dude OCs force himself onto another of your dude OCs for some homoerotic antagonism was, like, the height of storytelling.

Third, it's tonally dissonant. Though BA and its overarching story and world have their serious moments, it's by and large supposed to be light-hearted bordering on comedy (if you're at all familiar with the Slayers anime you'll see its stamp ALL OVER everything I did from like 1995-2005, and by stamp I mean the clone stamp tool from Photoshop :P). Starting it off with something dark and serious like this just doesn't make sense. More, Alex is as close as the main cast gets to a comic relief character (Sevvie's the other, but Sevvie's humour is largely either poking fun at people or staring at the fourth wall like she's on The Office). Why introduce your lighthearted quasi-himbo in the most overdramtic, angsty way possible?

And finally, who is Alexus and why do or should we care? Originally my plan was to alternate chapters and have some follow Sevvie and Karra, switch for a bit and have one follow Alex, back to Sevvie and Karra, move to Willow for a bit, another Alex, etc. Bowspirit's Aim was originally going to be at least 40 chapters. Now it's going to be lucky if it finishes four. There was just so much intended scope here that never got off the ground, and with Second, Third, and Fourth targets dealing with the girls, Alex's backstory chapter just doesn't fit.

While I don't foresee myself altering Alex's backstory even if I do do more with him in the future (and I do plan to do at least a couple things; he is my darling boy, after all) I did recently get the opportunity to improve on the oudated story. Back in 2019, a group of friends and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the first character I played was an AU version of Alex where he was a half elf and Mephala was a tiefling (and she was alive! Go Mephala!) Alexus was played for two campaigns and Mephala successfully made it through her one-shot, and in their post-canon D&D stories they've reunited, gotten vengeance on the Viktor analogue, and are happily chilling with each other once more. Hooray!

Anyway, clearly I have things to say about First Target, but the long and short of it is: I don't like it, let's move on :P