My new project I’ve been working on is a fan comic adaptation of a series of poems. And man it’s a weird position to be in, it has me thinking of all the choices that I thoughtlessly make when writing/illustrating my own original comics. So far I’ve been instinctively drawing the lines as these long panels that stretch the width of the page. Stanzas are shown using larger breaks between the line-panels. This preserves the shape of the poem in a cool way but I don’t know if I’m going to stick with it the whole time. There are interesting challenges I’ve been running into though, for example one of the poems is entirely parenthetical, how do I convey that in a comic? I don’t know yet.

I know I have to get over the idea of adapting things ‘wrong’, the author is dead, both figuratively and literally. But I am scared I’m going to misinterpret something so obviously that readers will notice. I barely finished high school and I dropped out of community college after one semester. I have this really stupid fear that I didn’t really learn to read and I’m missing out on all the secret true meanings of texts which you learn to find in the hallowed halls of AP Literature classes or whatever. This is very dumb.

I know that because of the gap between poems and comics there’s no way to make a truly line-by-line shot-for-shot adaptation but I do want to be faithful. What does that look like in a project like this? I’ve made it furry in a way I think fits with the way the poems describe its subjects and their individuality. Every character has the same species and the same features arranged in slightly different ways, I’ve been making the conscious effort to not draw fur outside of predetermined points of the face and heads of the characters(so no elbow tufts or chest scruffs or anything) this is not how I normally draw anthros. It wasn’t furry originally so this is a big point of transformation. What changes does this make to the text? What does this say about how I view my own furry art?

Fun to think about stuff. I try not to get caught up in idly introspecting for the sake of introspection but it’s good to work it out when it starts to bump up against something I’m trying to get done. What about you what are your thoughts.