Comics: Lyric one-shots from my Wistfeld playlists
Making comics out of song lyrics is one of my favourite ways to experiment with the medium.
I was looking for something in my studio the other day when I came across something I thought I’d lost: a small notebook of blank comic pages. Even though I’ve loved comics my entire life, I didn’t have a lot of experience working with the medium. So, when I decided to make The Wistfeld Project a novel/graphic novel hybrid, I knew I needed some practice. That’s where the comic notebook came in.
Before misplacing it, I used the notebook to make comics inspired by lyrics from songs on my Wistfeld playlists. I’m not the kind of person who can listen to music while I write, but I love building playlists for my projects and characters. I actually have a bunch for The Wistfeld Project: a general one for imagining scenes and writing inspo, one for Bets/Zabeth that helps centre me in her POV (I’m so proud of this one — it really feels like her), and even one for Zabeth x Roya for when I need to spent time exploring their complicated dynamic. You know how we all like to imagine elaborate music videos of our characters set to certain songs? (Don’t lie — we all do it.) That’s basically what these comics are.
I really enjoyed revisiting these old pencil and ink comics again. Some of them are pretty outdated now, but others still resonate. I thought it would be fun to breathe new life into a couple by digitizing them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of my favourites centre around Zabeth and Roya. What can I say? I’m a sucker for angst!
I decided to keep these two in grayscale as a bit of an homage to the original pencil and ink versions, which were coloured using Tombow grayscale dual brush pens.
Do you think I should do more of these? Let me know in the comments!
And, for your listening pleasure, here are the three playlists mentioned above. Enjoy!