Grug The Destroyer

I thought I'd just write a little bit about the comic I started on for Backwards Burd - if I'm gonna spend time organising people, putting the magazine together and promoting it then I want my own work in there too! I hadn't really done any comics for a looooooong time, so I read some books (Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics was particularly useful) and then just some good graphic novels and comics that Dan and Sajan recommended. With my research accrued I had a few small attempts, playing with the concepts outlined by McCloud. I like to subvert things, so I thought it might be cool if the main protagonist warrior guy was actually just a strong idiot controlled by his armour and sword, provoking the thought: Who is truly the tool? This idea also meant I would have to draw less characters, as conversations would go on between sections of the 1 guy's body instead of between multiple people.

I kept the drawing style simple because I'm quite out of practice, I was worried for ages that it would just be a waste of time shit comic, but then I thought there's loads of creative projects that get better over time. Look at Southpark, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have got the formula of what makes a good episode down to a T these days, the animation's better and most episodes feel like they make a clever point, but when they first started it was just funny, stupid bad animation.

There is some symbolism within Grug, mainly Grug representing the masses, the Helmet is the mind, the Armour is the heart (or passion) and the Sword is the phallus or lust. In this way the Hero of Grug the Destroyer has a wicked mind, an apathetic heart and an overeager lust for killing - not heroic qualities at all, but it's ok, because Grug is the manipulated victim of them. The whole set up has some freudian stuff going on as well, or so people who've read it have told me.

I can't reveal the story yet, but there will be a concluding chat about Grug when all is said and done. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can read Grug the Destroyer in Backwards Burd magazine, there's a link to it in the previous post.