Chapter one deals with the basic introductions of the characters and environment. It begins with Anji falling in and out of consciousness/reality, flashing back to his past life in San Francisco. His way of dealing with the unknown, novel and frightening situation is to connect it to the past, to contextualize, reminisce, ruminate and ultimately through that process escape. Anjuli hopefully will act as a foil to that philosophy in terms of its end: contextualization for her leads to understanding, conquering the fears and adapting. Sublimating inner neurosis to external good, in other words, is her goal: the Axon connects her with her family, and in the first chapter we experience, vicariously through dialogue, the pulls of family/past life on her present well-being. Instead of pushing away the past and being haunted by it, she welcomes it as a familiar embrace, uses it to empower herself in times of self-doubt, and finds impetus to forage new connections with her co-workers. Anji, by ruminating on but not dealing directly with his past life, feels more fettered by it and compelled to act against it by secluding himself.
Vasily is another interesting case in this respect. He vehemently externalizes his anxieties about family/past life, as shown, in this chapter, initially by his dialogue concerning his fiancee. He, like Anji, is negatively attached to the past, focusing heavily on its difference to his current life, almost pathologically keeping the two worlds separate. A point of differentiation between him and Anji is his almost relentless urge to talk about his other life; while Anji welcomes the void, Vasily is frightened of it and overcompensates by attempting to add back in the past. We will see later how this causes problems with his fiancee.
The other co-workers seem to have reached a higher level of emotional maturity, and while they do sympathetically talk about missing family and home, they do not seem initially to be hurt by it themselves.
Sympathy and empathy are important concepts I need to keep in mind in writing this first chapter; the version of the comic currently online focuses too heavily on Anji’s condition and puts the oppositional views of the other characters in the background. The result of which is sympathy towards none of the characters, and misunderstanding of all of them. This is the opposite of what I want to get across, hence the re-write. It’s harder this way, though, trying to write multiple protagonists with conflicting views that ultimately show all of them to be right, and not just “less wrong” than the others.
I’m also very interested in coming up with the names for the different parts of the microcosm (e.g. “Base” and “Axon”). Humans love categories and shortcuts, and I’ve noticed time and again the familiar nomenclature different subcultures come up with to describe parts of their environment. For Water, this nomenclature will for the most part allude to neurophysiology, as the microcosm is in a way a metaphor for the brain (and the conflicts of the characters can in this light be viewed as different aspects of the super-ego attempting to navigate through a problem).
Consistency is something I need to keep in mind, but not be fettered by.
unfinished possibly cover for chapter one: prolepsis
Speaking of keeping myself out of self-constructed fetters, I also need to find a comfortable illustration medium. The tablet is cumbersome, in the way that it makes everything drawn look more forced, more stilted and flat. Inking by hand, however, gives way to too many mistakes. I haven’t yet been able to find a happy medium (har har har).
