Who am I?

My "handle" is Garuda. I'm, like, the quiet guy, and stuff. I have a
soft spot for birds, as you can tell, and I collect retro video games,
as is incredibly pertinent to this comic. The things I get the most
out of are writing, drawing, reading, and being with friends. I like
just about any music, but because it's uncommon, I will say that I'm
a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. I am currently a freshman in college
I live in Indiana.

Warning: Here there be me speaking volumes on nothing at all.

Okay, so, the story of Nighthawk/Dayhawk is a somewhat long one.
I guess the place to start is with the bird people. I always liked birds, especially after
developing a close friendship with my cockatiel, Q. So, naturally, I was fascinated with the
various bird-man fantasy creatures that float around mythology, like the Japanese karasu Tengu,
and other such. Eventually I figured out how to draw them, and, since I always illustrated the
stories I wrote, they became fixtures of my writings, since I could draw them better than people.
Damn you, people, for having such hard faces to draw.

Anyway, every now and then, I have a dream in which one of those bird people shows up, and
my mind is blown because I'm so used to the "real world." You know, as close to it as you
ever come in dreams. So, I had a dream one night, probably in 2002 sometime, in which I was
playing a videogame in which the main character is a bird guy like that. Part of the game though, was
that every now and then, his black trenchcoat would turn red, and you would lose control of him and he would
flail around and attack people and stuff. Immediately I had the idea for Nighthawk/Dayhawk. Originally
what I thought was a video game format. It would be a far, far distant future, and there would be
some scientific explanation for why they were bird people; like, manipulated evolution or
somesuch. Anyway, you would play a guy who was mysteriously split between two people, one being the
cold, powerful, and calculating Nighthawk, the other being the uncontrollable, invincible
Dayhawk. You would be supported by the old, wise Dr. Rost (heheh, irony). At some point you would
be facing an enemy on a space station, and the enemy, when defeated, would blow up the entire space
station, and your body would be obliterated. Dr. Rost would retrieve the remains, only to find you
completely healed, and now not only Nighthawk/Dayhawk, but the best of both, and he would name you
"Skyhawk." Obviously, this isn't how the comic came to be realized.

So, a couple years later, I came to the Indiana Academy, a residential highschool. Because of its
quirkiness as an institution, I started a comic strip about it, but gave up after a couple weeks and about
a hundred abortive strips. I have trouble concentrating in class if I'm not doing anything with my
hands, so I doodled a lot. Eventually, out popped some of the characters who would be used in N/D.
ND himself, Lu (who is, incidentally, named for a character from a story I wrote in fourth grade some
time, named "Lu'ram"), and Marus, pretty much. So, working on this comic became my method to keep from
zoning out in class, and pretty soon I had all the main characters designed, and I began writing
up an outline for the whole comic. That outline ended up being thirteen pages, handwritten as small as
I could read, on college-ruled notebook paper, stuffed into the sketch book where I drew the original designs
for the characters. Soon I was ready to start rough drafting, sometime in February of 2005.

My rough draft was again on a series of looseleaf notebook pages, drawn in pen, squeezed about sixteen
panels to a page. In three or four months I finished the rough draft, which came out at exactly one
hundred pages of this (the portion I've finished final drafting at the time that I'm writing this, 169 pages,
is about forty pages of the rough draft).

The final draft has been very weird, as well, because of the technology I've had at my disposal at
various points in its production. At first, I was using Photoshop Elements (which has no pen tool), and a
pen tablet. To do the outlines I wanted to do, I had to use a hold-shift-and-click kind of thing with
the paint brush, and trace the rough draft as best I could. That's why the first several pages are so
jagged and poorly drawn - I promise, I'm a better artist than that! Eventually my pen tablet broke,
and I had to use the mouse. The quality actually went up then, because I ended up putting more work into
each page with the mouse. Eventually I started being too lazy to plug the mouse into my laptop and just
used my touchpad, and the same thing happened; my hand started hurting, and the pages started looking better.
Well, it was like that for a long time, until I got Photoshop CS from school, and a new pen tablet
for Christmas. The pen tool in CS is a freakin' godsend for this kind of artwork. All the best pages
were done with that configuration. Well, good things don't last, and that tablet broke too. So I'm back
to using the touchpad, but at least I have Photoshop CS, so the pages still look pretty decent. Without the
tablet though, I have to do all my rough drafts by hand, scan them in, and arrange them just how I want them
before I start the outline.

A word on Neetch

One thing that seems really obvious to me about this comic is the constant trouble I had with the character
development for Neetch. So I figure a brief history of Neetch is in line, to clear up the layers of
redefinition after redefinition that clutter up her character in the comic.

Neetch was born of Lu, by and large. I was sitting there, writing out my ideas for the comic, and
it suddenly struck me that Lu should be bisexual. No reason, just part of her character. So to flesh
out that dynamic, I created the character Neetch - so named because the name "Friedrich Nietsche" was
running through my head for no reason whatsoever. My original idea for Neetch was that she would be
a straight-up silly character, inspired in part by Ed from Cowboy Bebop (all one episode I've seen
of it anyway). So I drew her as a scrawny little girl with wild eyes and a JtHM hairdo, with the two
spikes in front. By the time I got to developing her character, I decided she should be less flat and
silly, and a little more masculine and friendly-but-selective. So you get there the character she appears
to be the first time you see her, but with a little residual of that one-dimensional silliness, in the end
making her seem just like a shallow stereotypical movie-lesbian type. This just plain doesn't improve for
the next long while, much as I tried. By the end of Volume 2 she seems a little more fleshed out, and
that makes me feel a little better, but those early pages still rub me the wrong way in terms of Neetchiness.

Currently, Neetch is something of a figurehead character for me. She and Lu aren't characters of N/D anymore
so much as they are general characters of mine, who recur in most things I do nowadays. For instance, I'm
currently working on a comic strip starring Neetch, in which she serves as something of a humorous and
self-deprecating portrait of myself, except not. I'm also working on a character for enterVOID.com, using
Neetch as the basis, but not exactly the same character. And I think a cool project some time would be
to make a live-action short film about her. With people, of course.
Anyway, I like Neetch.

Cast

Here're some character sheets for the main characters. I'll put up more as more characters are introduced.