About
Well congratulations! You've found the secret-but-not-very-well-hidden About page!
Here I will write down the entire history of Nighthawk/Dayhawk. Brace yourselves!
I'll try to minimize spoilers.
Beware enormous wall of text!
I have a lot to say about this comic, and I'm gonna say it all here!
Ultimately, N/D began with a dream, like many of my projects - especially the ones that fall through in a big way. And at first, this one did too; I had this dream in 2002. In the dream, I was playing a video game in which I controlled a birdman character (at the time, all my major projects somehow involved bird people - since that's what I could draw). He was wearing a black jacket, and at completely random intervals the jacket would suddenly turn red and I would lose control of him. He would run around, bump into things, and attack everything in sight. When I remembered the dream later in the day, I immediately named the character Nighthawk/Dayhawk, and began thinking about what kinds of stories I could make for him. For a long time I envisioned a video game, as in the dream. There would be you, the main character, who would have a split personality but also be somewhat superherolike. All I knew is that at one point you would be on a space station, and get killed in an explosion. Then the scientist guy who has supported you the whole way would somehow revive you, and it would be revealed that dying has merged your two personalities, and you are now not Nighthawk or Dayhawk, but Skyhawk. You would now wear a white trenchcoat and be both incredibly strong and very smart and calculating.
Obviously, this story didn't have hardly anything to it. Though I came back to the idea every now and then, it basially sat forgotten for a couple years. What brought it back was another dream sometime around October of 2004, again featuring some bird characters. This time, there was a tall and confident woman who had no arms. For some reason she stuck with me - and the name Lu just seemed to fit. I remembered that, in the first story I had ever written using birdlike characters (back in the fourth grade), there had been a girl named "Lu'ram," and therefore Lu now had a last name.
For some reason it just seemed appropriate that Lu should appear in whatever I did with Nighthawk/Dayhawk (ND), and suddenly the story started to make more sense. But it didn't have a plot yet! Well, about this time, George Carlin had a new standup routine, the one about how he likes when nature destroys stuff. It wasn't all that funny I didn't think, but he brought up an interesting point - if there's any one thing that could tear the whole damn world apart, it's a power outage. So, thinking about that, combined with my habitual distrust for corporations, I started thinking of how this might happen, and how it might be worked into an action story. This was where the character of Currad Marus came in. He had delusions of being a Nordic warlord of the Dark Ages, and wanted to shut down the modern world to live them. This wasn't going to be related to N/D, but suddenly I realized it would be a good plot. At the same time though, it seemed that ND should be fighting Nazis or the KKK or something. Then I thought of the Avian Perfectionists - who I would much later change to Androperfectis, to reduce the bird characters to just the drawing style. It was all coming together.
In November of 2004, I set out to write down all my thoughts, and get a full, coherent story plotted out before I began working on anything. I was determined that it would be good. Of course, I was a junior in highschool, so naturally it didn't have much of a chance, but it would be better than the other things I had done up to that point, to be sure.
So the story began to take form. Keep in mind, I didn't know how to structure a good story at the time. In the original draft, for example, Dayhawk spends a full thirty pages chopping up APers with medieval weapons, and I didn't even make it clear that he was Dayhawk. I wrote down every idea I had. Many events were based just on images in my head, such as a brief image of Lu in a jacket with mannequin arms stuffed in the sleeves, flinging the arms at attacking APers to fight them. I wrote as small as I could read, and filled up thirteen pages of notebook paper. This included a basic outline, of course. While taking notes, it suddenly occurred to me that Lu should be bisexual - and thus Neetch was born. Originally Neetch was nothing more than a silly, horny, stereotypical lesbian character (remember, I didn't know how to write for characters back then). But I wanted Lu and ND to be a couple, silly me, so Lu and Neetch were not involved in any way, except sharing an apartment. Little did I know that Neetch would become probably the best developed character in the comic, let alone a floater character that I now use in just about everything I write.
Somewhere along the way I read something about Mayan mythology and decided to work it in. I don't remember when that was.
After finishing those thirteen pages of notes and outline, I practiced drawing dramatic poses and birdlike characters. Then I set out drawing a rough draft. I had a stack of looseleaf notebook paper, on which I drew each panel disconnected from the others, in pen. I drew in class when I didn't need to work on anything, in my dorm in bed, at home watching tv, and just about any other time. After a few months I had finished it, a hundred pages of tightly crammed square Ridleygrams with chickenscratch dialogue and notes scribbled in the margins. I showed it to some friends to read, and they couldn't read it at all. Then I realized that a lot of people would assume that bird-looking characters meant "furry" pornography, regardless of what I drew (yeah yeah, there was a sex scene, but hey, I was trying to make an action movie here, and the bird style gave me an excuse not to draw any, ahem, bits), and I stopped showing it to people except one or two.
The digital stage of the comic went through various stages as well. I began in Photoshop Elements, working with a tablet. I wanted to do it quickly, though, so I didn't draw my normal way - making the art pretty horrendous, at least by my estimation. Soon my tablet broke, which they always do, and I continued with a mouse. Having to learn a new way to draw it all helped the art get marginally better. Then later I forgot to take the mouse with me on a trip and had to use the touchpad, which again made the art better. I got another touchpad then, and it broke in a month and a half, so I was back to the touchpad. A big change came when I got Photoshop CS from my school, and was able to use the pen tool, which let me use curved lines that were even (I had used jagged lines up until now, because I wanted it to have even outlines but be quick to draw), and other ways of coloring that made it much better and faster.
As I drew on, I became somewhat enamored with Neetch. I began giving her some emotional baggage that was at least somewhat believable, and shifting her design bit by bit. I even tried to make her hard to like - giving her some perverse sexual tastes at one point, but I nixed that eventually - to make it edgier. I'm so mean to her. But I do it because I love her!
There were to be five volumes, of varying length. Volume One was about forty two pages, Two about sixty, Three and Four each about eighty. I finished drawing Three while in Austria over the summer of 2006. I drew Four in my first year of college, but grew rapidly more dissatisfied with it. When time came to begin Five, I realized that I didn't like my rough draft of it at all. So I scrapped it and rewrote it. Then I drew rough panels for it, just like I had at the beginning of the whole project, and the rough draft came to thirty-six pages; more than a third the length of the whole previous version, and much better.
I transfered to a different college after my freshman year, largely for the better art program at this new one. Taking Art History had a big impact on the story. I went back and rewrote more of Volume Five. Now it was barely recognizable as the same comic it had been in One through Four. So I decided to settle down and rewrite everything before it. Throughout the first semester of my Sophomore year, I wrote what would be Part One. It went through about six drafts. I gave Neetch much more character and a much bigger role. After writing Part One, I went back and rewrote Part Two (previously Volume Five) further. Then I did a more comprehensive rough draft of Part Two, which came to 131 pages.
At this point I had worked on N/D for about three years. I decided that I had put too much time and effort into it to just set it aside when I finished, and it needed to be printed and sold somehow. So I drew Part Two in color in Photoshop, and now began shading the pages for the first time, and adding more visual effects. For pages posted on the internet, I removed the shading, so that there would be more reason to have a printed version.
In September of 2008, in my junior year of college, I realized that I was getting tired. N/D has potential to be fun, and has some value to it, but is still ultimately a project I started when I was seventeen years old, and I know that I can write much more mature stories now. I have started and scrapped probably fifteen stories since I started N/D, but lately the stories have been better, and I want to work on them. I had forty-three pages left in Part Two, and all of Part One to work on. So I put my nose to the grindstone, stopped shading the pages, and finished Part Two on October 16th. I had the idea, though, to open the project up to other comic artists, because I have made a few friends in that community over the years. I guess I'll contribute some of it myself as well, but I think that having several very different styles in Part One will make it much better. And all the people who help, you are all awesome forever. When Part One nears completion, I plan to go back and shade and add effects to the last forty-three pages of Part Two. When everything is finished, I hope to print it all out and maybe sell copies at used book stores and comic book shops. Giving cuts of course to everyone who has helped.
So that's where I am! N/D has been a wild ride, keeping me grounded throughout more or less four straight years of drastic transitions in my life, and I think I can be proud of the final product.
A note on the internet run of N/D
I hadn't intended to post N/D online for a long time - in fact I have no idea what I had planned to do with it. But when I was up to sixty completed pages, I began posting twice a week on a deviantART account. Because I had so many pages beforehand, and because the drawing style was quick, I don't think I ever had fewer than twenty buffer pages. Not to brag; I could have spent a full week on each page, and the early pages would have been much better looking. Around this time I tried to make a ComicGenesis account, but couldn't get my hands on any good FTP software that I could figure out. Fortunately, the second semester of my senior year in highschool, I took a class on multimedia production, and was able to get a good one from the professor, which made ComicGenesis a real possibility. I got this site up and running in June that year - the first page went up on 06/06/06, just for kicks and giggles - and set it to update a page a day until it caught up with the original deviantART mirror. I didn't know enough HTML to decorate the page, however, so it was just a blank page with the comic and an ad. Around October of that year the two mirrors were caught up, and I read up on HTML. The second version of the page went up - and was essentially unchanged until October of 2008, after I finished Part Two.
A few words of thanks
-Of course a lot of thanks goes to one of my oldest friends, Becca-Jo, who has held me together a lot over the years, and who was the first I ever showed the comic to.
-Chibity helped proofread the comic for a long time, and gave me a lot of support.
-H. Carlian (or Icarus) of the comic Inhuman has been an enormous influence on me. I can't really explain it, just read Inhuman dammit.
-Around the time I asked Icarus if I could link to Inhuman, he introduced me to Tanookie, who had been reading the comic for awhile. I was working on Volume Four, and about ready to throw the project away forever. Meeting someone who had read the comic before I had showed it to them, and who is just an awesome person, really revitalized me. Otherwise, this all would have stopped dead around page 200.
Thank you all, you're all awesome, kickass, and just generally dandy.
