Couple of things this time! First of all, I think I promised a double comic. Too bad!

Moving on, let me tell you a little bit about how I first came up with the idea for Floatillion. Settle in!!!

It was roughly a year ago, exactly on New Years Eve as a matter of fact. It had been a very unproductive year. The last thing I had done was a collection of short stories called Carefree Arizona  which I had finished at the end of High School, in 2009. After that I had worked on another collection of short stories called ROTOR, but somehow the project fell apart and I never finished it. Then, the summer of 2010 I completely lost the motivation to even try to do something. I even stopped drawing, all I could manage were abstract doodles for an entire summer.

New Years rolls around and I’m feeling pretty unsatisfied about the whole year. And I’m talking to my friend Mr. Yes about our various project ideas. Mostly his ideas, I don’t really have any at this point. He starts talking about some story collection idea of his, and somehow the word “animate” comes up, as in the adjective, not the verb. But I take it to mean the verb, and this jogs my memory of a painting I did while I was working on ROTOR. The painting is based on a zoetrope, a very early device for creating simple, looping animations. With part of a moon cycle drawn above it, because to me that seemed like a very natural, very simple looping animation. Roughly a frame a day, and then it loops every month.

This painting was going to be the cover for my short story collection. Loops and animation were going to be a significant theme. And I’m still stuck on the themes an ideas of ROTOR. I kind of have blue balls from not having made those ideas real. And on New Years I zero in on a very specific, but minor aspect of ROTOR. The Church of Three Rivers, a mysterious cult that a mysterious, seemingly all-powerful woman is in charge of. They are one of the major forces that lobby for Project ROTOR to be constructed. My original plan was for this cult to only be mentioned, MAYBE appear in one story.

Instead I decide to focus in on this aspect of it. Cults are a fascinating thing, and I suddenly really wanted to make a series about a cult. But not a regular cult. Something with a twist. And something utilizing the concepts and themes I had created for ROTOR. And so eventually The Church of Three Rivers expanded and shoved all the other plot elements out of the way. And ROTOR started to turn into Floatillion.

But what’s a series without a main character? I drew Mask Boy for the first time at exactly midnight, on a piece of graph paper that was laying around. I wanted a character to welcome in this new, productive year with me. But I wanted something simple, like Mickey Mouse. So I took the black part of Mickey’s head, cut off the ears, expanded his little widows peak, and stuck it on a drawing kid wearing a hoodie. I named him Mask Boy because his helmet thing reminded me of a mask, plus I just liked the sound of it. And so Mask Boy was born on exactly New Years Day, 2011. He’s a year old as of January 1st, 2012. Here’s the first few drawings of him:

But Mask Boy and Floatillion didn’t come together until much later. He used to be just a character I drew. I didn’t have a series for him or anything, and didn’t know what he was even like. Later on I started thinking about the cult idea in more detail, and I kept imagining this kid playing this his friends, and it was Mask Boy, he was the kid. Mask Boy was playing with his friends and having a lot of fun, but then you zoomed in, into the black of his helmet, and you could see his true thoughts. Everything was hazy and red, he was playing but he didn’t know why. He wasn’t happy, he had just been trained to look like he was having fun. And that’s how Mask Boy and Floatillion connected. And where a lot of the themes for Floatillion, like the red dream river, came from.

But really Floatillion started when SBboard became a comic site. It used to be a bunch of different things, but Buff had been uploading his Nice Guys for a while, and then Trent joined in with Gay Cat. I joined in just because it seemed like a fun thing to do. Didn’t give it a lot of thought. I tried doing a gag comic at first, but that was hard. So decided to just go for it with this cult idea. So with a very vague idea in my head, I made the first comic. And then I kept making them. And I won’t stop making them until this story is finished.

Thanks for listening, you’re all my golden children.