About two years ago, I was a bit stalled out. Editing for search engines and local publishers was bringing in some cash, and the Ubercross Abecedaria was simmering, but I didn’t have a lot of interest in a big creative project beyond that. I started to think that my days of writing comics were behind me. And then, thanks to a couple of odd strokes of luck, I found myself on Webtoon, writing Traveler.
Traveler is the story of Trevor Carr, a young, naïve kidult who gets the powers to fly and teleport, then uses those powers to help others…though the consequences of his actions are more mixed than in your typical superhero story. There was a certain meta sense in which Trevor’s situation was mine: I too had been thrown into a world of expanded horizons.
Webtoon’s format is immensely freeing: instead of getting packed into 3 or 4 panels in a newspaper strip or comic-book page, story installments are encouraged to go on for 50 panels or more, the better to be scrolled by phone-addicted young readers. I’d been given an “infinite canvas,” as one of my cartooning heroes once called it, and I set out to fill it.
Traveler was not a raging commercial success for Webtoon, but we did well enough artistically that I’m in talks with them and others to pursue further projects.
Besides their general shared category as “newspaper-published distractions,” comics and crosswords have an odd relationship. One is about creating stories by image, with words a secondary layer on top: the other is about creating an image out of words, with narrative an occasional bonus but usually absent.
But every once in a while…as in the mosaics we made to mark the series’ conclusion…my experience in one field helps me in the other.
What would a crossword transformed to a comic be like? Diverse in its subject matter, unconstrained by genre, delighting in improbable connections. In terms of its ambition, I think Traveler is my Ubercrossiest comic ever. Tomorrow: a few notes about my comicsiest Ubercross.