Nothing is better and nothing is best, we are unhappy, we are unblessed (pt. 1)

Instead of our usual End of The Year ruminations, here's a sort of End of An Era post. It's story time!

Three years ago, end of November 2018, me and Protector (now First Knife) Team got hit with the news that Image will only pay us the promised advance payment for the second issue of our book in the late January, basically rendering me broke in the most expensive month of the year, as well as the after-Holidays dead season. So, I dropped a pretty desperate tweet asking to give me some quick and urgent work - cover, commissions, or short comics around 5 to 10 pages - and got some really nice responses, along with a lot of moral support (I always crave for it on twitter dot com, haha) and a few little gigs. Couple commissions here and there, a one-page comic - and I'm already not that broke... But also, it was when I got a message from a big industry writer, asking me about what exactly I'd like to work on. I described to them my current set of interesting (basically, all the Slavic Nihilism stuff, even the then-very-murky outline for Yesaul) and told them that if I wanted to be comfortable with a story, it should probably be something like that.

Now, I don't think Western writers really hear the same thing I want them to hear when I say words like "Slavic", "folklore", or "less grounded in real world and reference-based". Because otherwise I don't understand how, after a very similar conversation, Matt Kindt proceeded to send me his John Wick pastiche script, very American fair wall to wall, with some names hastily changed to Russian and a sprinkle of folklore monsters added to it (I refused the gig with a heavy heart; later Matt Lesniewski did a very good job turning the script into an excitingly looking comic - it is called Crimson Flower, and you probably know it).

Similarly to the Kindt situation, I'm not really sure how me and the writer came out on the other end of the conversation with plans to do a 100+ pages horror graphic novel about Chernobyl (the real one). Remember, I only wanted a 5-10 pages gig to survive through a couple of months! And to be fair, I did mention Soviet Pioneer Horror tales and Junji Ito to them, so it was more of a case of me giving an array of subjects, and writer going with the one I was honestly the least interested in. I don't blame the writer for pushing me into this direction -  I blame myself for being too inert and compliant. To be absolutely frank, I was just humbled and a liiitle bit intimidated by this Big, Real Writer showing their eagerness to support me and work with me!

Anyway, we started discussing a story set in Chernobyl-esque setting. Not EXACTLY Chernobyl, because I STILL wanted to have a looser, less-grounded world to play in; and so it became something from the other world, resembling ours, but ain't 100% it. Something we later saw in Disco Elysium - up to including a disaster similar to the Chernobyl one, but with a different world an philosophy to house it.

A week or two later, the writer came back with first draft of their script ready. And as I mentioned earlier, the dang thing immediately grew to nearly 100 pages long, and only went up from there! Without any proper time to think, but immediately freaked out by it, I reluctantly agree to work on the opening of this comic as a pitch (paid page by page, from their pocket) - after all, the writer did all the work for me already! The script was almost finished!

By that time, I already had some money to spare; the crisis was over! But the new obligation has begun.

(I will stop here, because divving this thing up in two part is probably the only merciful way to let you people actually read this unblessed scroll of pain; more of this later tonight!)