A Kneesvember 2024 Post-mortem

Unlike Woven from last year, I didn't really have much of an idea for what this year's Kneesvember story (title TBD) was going to be about until it was about time to start making it. I had had "Chickadee explores an apartment (post-apocolyptic? [sic]) written on my ideas board for over a year, because there was some imagery in my mind that I thought could be fun to try to put on paper, but I had little more than that to begin with.

The day after I finished Woven, I wrote this comic which ended up being a foundation of sorts which I would build the rest of the story around:

(Fuzzie started out as 'Connie')

Sometime in mid-October of this year, I started to get pretty anxious and worried that this story was going to bomb, so I finished up my other projects and put my full focus onto formulating some sort of storyline. I started with some lists to describe what I wanted to get out of this one. I've done similar lists since Spores, which I think had something like:
• science fiction
• multiple species
• black and white with one colour for emphasis (selective monochrome)
• how does diet, communication work?

Woven  had:
• loneliness
• creative process
• coloured pencils

For this year's story, I knew I wanted it to be an adventure story, closer to my crow story, Hop!, where the characters moved often and encountered things along their journey. I also knew that I wanted to dip my toes into post-apocalyptic territory and explore what it would mean to some animals that humans had disappeared.

I decided I wanted to have the protagonists be a gang of chickadees because they fit the bill of (a) being year-round residents native to Montréal, (b) hanging out in social groups, and (c) being small enough to go just about anywhere. It helped that chickadees are thought to be pretty intelligent birds!

I consider these three to be the first characters I've 'designed'. Chickadees tend to look pretty similar looking across the species, so I had to come up with a plausible way to distinguish them. One having bands was an obvious choice, but it wouldn't help much if the legs were 'off-screen'. Juveniles are pretty easy to pick out from their scruffy appearance, which can be exaggerated for a comic. And then I knew some real chickadees could have serious variation in their plumage because of one I spotted in the wild last summer with a mostly white head. Patches having a missing foot was an addition I made because I often see birds missing toes or whole legs, and I thought it would be nice to include that without showing it as something that ever holds them back. And it also gave me the peace of mind that no matter what weird angle I'll need to use, the reader would be able to tell which character is which from just the legs or the head.

Really got its back in focus there.

I wanted to make the story post-apocalyptic for several reasons. I think it's an interesting backdrop for a story, one that hasn't been explored very much from the perspective of animals. I liked the juxtaposition of having such an ordinary thing like a peanut to be so scarce and desired. I also really wanted to draw some human skulls.

On November 1st, I had planned up until the sequence ending with Pips sitting, perched on top of a human skull. I was so looking forward to this day. I knew that nothing much was really happening before then, and there would be no big clues to it happening, so I was hoping to catch a lot of people off guard.

As an Easter Egg, I modelled its teeth after my own, and had it in the sweater I was wearing the day I drew it. The apartment it's in is inspired by my own too. So the first skeleton seen in the book is of the author, me. That's False Knees canon.

I imagined there might be some skepticism over the appearance of the bone-white skeletons sprinkled throughout the comic, so my partner, Mélodie, and I took a bit of a deep, morbid dive into understanding what happens to bodies after death i.e. how fast they decompose. And much to my delight (for the story's sake), it can happen surprisingly fast! Reality would likely be more gruesome than what I depicted, but I was never interested in grossing anyone out. I just wanted to show that people were not going to play a leading role in this picture.

...we really learned more than we will ever need to know about bodies decomposing...

At this stage, I was considering what events could have led to the death of all humans in a short time span, but ultimately it wasn't important to me or the story I wanted to tell. I enjoy having a little mystery in the media I consume. In my experience, explanations for implausible circumstances tend to take me out of the story.

The final major thing I had left to figure out was which media/colours I was going to work with. Taking a lot of inspiration from the comic Omnivisibilis by Matthieu Bonhomme and Lewis Trondheim, I wanted to make a comic with black ink and a blue highlight.

I did a bunch of sketches using all the gouache and watercolour blues I had on hand to see which one I liked the best.

Another big consideration (which I had learned from making Woven) is that not all colours work when moving the art from the paper to the screen. Some beautiful blues just don't scan well, while others are totally altered when working with CMYK colour profiles.

This is important to my process because books are printed using CMYK. There are some work-arounds that I'm vaguely aware of, but I am totally self-taught for all of this, and at this point it's like October 30th, so let's just go with a colour that I know won't cause me problems! That colour ended up being Prussian Blue.

This is mostly what I used to make this series. This was my first experience of using this Kuretake brush pen, which I really enjoyed, though I started using more brush and india ink as the month went on. The white blob on my pencil is a hunk of moldable plastic that Mélodie helped me make for a more ergonomic pencil grip.

In terms of the layout for the comic, I decided to make the 'pages' the same dimensions as I did with Woven. I split a sheet of 9"x12" cold pressed watercolour paper in two, to make two rectangles measuring 11.5cm x 18cm (I know I'm mixing units of measurement, it is the Canadian Curse). And each 11.5cm x 18cm rectangle will be a page in the final book!

So this scene in the art museum is 2 pages, and I made between 2 and 6 pages per day.

Occasionally, when I wanted to dwell on some details, I would use an entire 9"x12" sheet for a single page.

I take a lot of time planning out the shape and size of panels. I find it really fun! It involves a little bit of easy arithmetic–which is why my draft paper is often peppered in little additions and multiplications. Adding some space to a panel here where I need more room for dialogue or action, subtracting from a panel here where I can afford to just have a talking head or a simple action... figuring out which aspect ratios convert best to social media. It's a fundamental aspect to making a comic.

I always had it in the back of my mind that this would eventually be read as a physical book, so I put a lot of thought into how important details would be revealed to the reader. You don't want to put a big surprise on the second page of a spread, for instance, because the reader will inadvertently look at it and spoil themselves. This is a factor for online reading too! I like instagram's one-image-revealed-at-a-time carousel. I think it's a great way to force a story to be read at a controlled pace.

I would usually start each day with an overall idea of how much the story had to move forward and then I would plan out in thumbnails the contents of the strip. Here are some examples of the chaos.

Some days I would start drawing the final comic at 11am, others I wouldn't start until 3 or 4pm because I was still in the planning phase. On days like that, I would be finishing by around 11pm. I'm happy to say that I only had one instance of madly scrambling to upload just before midnight! An improvement from previous years.

I have a hard time with dialogue. It's not very uncommon for me to be figuring out the dialogue last. Sometimes there are space restrictions, sometimes phrasing that I thought of at 10am doesn't sound grammatically correct at 10pm.

The great thing about comics is that so much story can be conveyed in pictures! I tried to give myself lots of opportunities this year to draw scenery, which I prefer drawing, compared to dialogue-heavy panels. However, scenery takes much longer to draw, and with my daily deadlines I was pretty restricted to how much detail I could put into them. It's a small regret that I have that I maybe didn't depict the world exactly as I would've achieved with a little more time. 

Another small regret I have is with the media I was using. In my process, I typically sketch using pencil, followed by ink (brush pen or india ink and paintbrush), erase the pencil, and then paint with watercolour or gouache. But because I was doing this in a short timespan, the ink didn't have enough time to fully set, and the paint would cause some of the ink to bleed.

This is particularly noticeable in the leaves in this frame above. This was pretty frustrating. I tried drying the ink using a hair dryer to no difference. I ended up having to change the order of my media–painting before applying ink–and using more water-fast pens, like Pigma microns, which changed the look of the comic. I thought I had tested my media thoroughly before starting the month, but I guess I didn't test them with the time restrictions I would have.

I like having different species interact, and in the False Knees universe, animals cannot communicate with one another outside of their own species. So interactions are usually limited to predator/prey situations or misconceptions/misunderstandings. I wish I had had more time to delve into the 'lore' these chickadees had for ducks.

A few days before I started, I was describing what I thought the story could be to Mélodie, and I knew that I wanted the chickadees to make it to an airplane which they would accidentally blow up. We later joked that the entire comic was just an excuse for me to draw a plane exploding.

And of course, there are many ideas that don't make it.

I wanted Pips to have a sympathetic view of people, and early on I imagined a dream sequence in which she was dreaming about her old human friend who would feed her peanuts. In the dream, the human's head would morph into Patches waking her. It didn't really fit anywhere and is a little overdone.

A couple days before the end of the month, I still wasn't sure what I was going to do for an ending. Ending's are notoriously difficult to write and can be pretty unsatisfying as a reader. Originally I just wanted to show some landscapes of different animals living in a post-human world. I didn't want to do anything crazy. I then had the idea to show the animals we had already seen in the story living out their own stories, and to simply show our Peanut Gang continuing to go on quests by redoing the first one shown in the comic.

It's funny how over a month, their designs got a little simplified.

And that's that! As always, making Kneesvember was a great challenge and I learned a lot about what I'm capable of doing in a day with a lot of help from my partner keeping me alive, and a lot of concentration fuelled by intense pressure from myself and an audience. This was the biggest project I think I've ever made in terms of total number of pages. It's going to be a full 30+ pages longer than Spores, which was the longest I had made up until this.

Anway, I'm sure I could go on and on...

But it's time to end on some FALSE KNEES FACTS!

• Number of 9x12 pages: 60

• Number of pages the book will have: 109+

• Number of panels: 339

• Number of chickadees drawn in the comic: 543

• Number of confirmed human deaths (distinct skeletons seen): 18

• Total number of hours worked: ~300 (not including time spent thinking about it in bed when I couldn't sleep)

There are originals and prints for sale in my store!

Thank you so much for reading, I will let you know when it's ready as a physical book. Let me know if you have any questions!

-Joshua