Pinocchio Thoughts

Well, he finally got his wish, didn't he? To be a real boy. I mean, going into the original story, I knew that was the ending. Everyone does. But the original's decision to make the puppet body a shell at the end of the story for the Real Boy P to look at and laugh over was what made me really invested in sharing this story.

That we go thru the whole story with our Puppet Pal, we watch him get hung, drown, eaten, etc, and then discarded at the end for the morality of seemingly Someone Else, just felt needlessly cruel. The whole book was pretty needlessly cruel to every character. Humorously so, I should add! But I wasn't laughing with Real Boy Pinocchio at the end. I felt like it was a bit of a non-ending? Like the right one didn't get the happy ending we wanted him to get. Some new kid took his place. And all the new kid does is laugh. Laugh and dance.

The whole story was greatly ham-handed in handling it's moral. But that's the 1800's for ya. And that's also the charm of the story made up by Carlo Collodi. What I never really put in my version was his narration, talking directly to you the audience, like an old man in the corner of a room who's got a funny story for ya. It really is ultimately a great little book. But I felt a profound sadness in that ending that I don't know if Carlo meant to bring about.

Gioia Fiammenghi, the illustrator who's drawings were in the Puffin Classic version of the book I have, might have felt that. Her final illustration (shown above) was the final page of the book. And I took a lot of inspiration from her art for the characters in my adaptation. I thank her the most in this endeavor, as her work pointed me in the right direction.

What a wild ride. I believe this begun in 2014, around the time of BACK's beginning as well. And now here it is finished, along with BACK. Everything from then is over, finally. Now what? That's a good question. One I've been pondering since 2020. The most I can come up with is to just do some comics. FOA is still gonna go on. But I need something more out of this. 

As I said before, I got some short comics and ideas I want to do next. Gotta shake out the cobwebs and get back on the horse of writing more, too. There's a longer story taking shape in my head, too. "A Sinner's Prayer" is an idea I've mentioned before, but it's taken on so many shapes that I barely understand what kind of story I want it to be anymore. Gotta just nail it down and what comes out, comes out. That's the idea: Just make some shit.

A collected Pinocchio book is definitely going to happen. Topatoco is working on their own in-house crowdfunding system that we will be using. Before Pinocchio, tho, we still got BACK volume 3 to make. So, let's let our boy rest. He's deserved it, I think.