While I am not really happy with how it’s coming so far, I thought I would post the progress of my new experiment:
Yes, what you are looking at is an anthropomorphic white tiger, holding a rose, grieving at the grave of a deceased loved-one. There is actually a complicated back-story which I’ve played around with over a period of about 10 years. It originally began as the story of a werewolf who attacked a lion at a zoo, only to be eaten by the lion. But since werewolves can only be killed by silver bullets, its essence combined with the lion to make a lion/werewolf. Well, by day he was a lion/human, and then became a lion/wolfman during a full moon. The first incarnation of this tale was a short story I turned in as an assignment for a creative writing class. That draft was a really off-the-wall narrative with no grounding or internally consistent reality. The story was not well received, nor should it have been. Prose is not my expertise, and I was pretty lazy about trying to make it cohesive. Years later, I tried to revisit the story in graphic novel form, changing the main protagonist from a lion to a white tiger because they were cooler and more fun to draw. Here’s a conceptual painting that I thought I might use for the cover:
Aside from this painting, I never got around to doing more than a couple sketches for the first and second. I can’t explain why I stopped working on it, but perhaps it seemed to much of a big project to write a graphic novel at the time. I never let it go completely, though, if for no other reason than that I hate not finishing things. When I met my (eventual) wife, my past writer aspirations came up during my courtship of her. We decided we would finish the story together, and fleshed out some of the plot. The name Snowflake comes from one of our brainstorming sessions. You see, the zoo held a promotional contest for third-graders to choose a name for the newly arrived white tiger. Anyway, there are more details regarding his past, his motivation, and who it was he is visiting at the grave. Well, I am not getting into any of that. It all seems like a lot of information to communicate on a t-shirt, doesn’t it? As I mentioned in my last post, the point of my new experiment is to tell a partial story with a single graphic, and have both the wearer of the shirt and everyone who sees it fill in the rest using their imaginations. So far I am not digging this image, as something about this style just doesn’t feel right. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes over the next couple of days. I may start over, and I may put this story away for another bunch of years until I get more inspiration.
