I'll admit I don't look at or read much of the material that's currently on the radar in the fandom. I rarely browse image boards, and if I do post something, it's generally a quick post, maybe answer a few questions, and then I'm off until later. I may sound like the odd man out, but I've never quite been able to "get into" the fandom like so many other folks have. I'm not talking about the people that make it into some kind of lifestyle thing, but just the folks that really follow what's going on with it and spend a decent amount of their time involved in it. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoy drawing anthropomorphic stuff (if I didn't, I wouldn't still be drawing it!), but it's a hobby, not a way of life for me. Kinda like the motorcycle stuff. It's a hobby, but I'm not gonna be one of those tools that dresses in a gimp outfit every day and changes his name to "Sawblade", gets covered in tattoos, and quotes Harley ads verbatim. ;-)
But here's my question regarding the book you quoted: could that story also be told, the same way, with the characters as humans? If so, then the anthropomorphic characters really serve no purpose. They're just people in costumes. If, however, the creatures behave differently than humans, and perhaps more like their animal counterparts (to a point where the character and/or story would not or could not be the same if substituted with a human), then their being anthropomorphic would serve a purpose. Even Blacksad, which uses anthropomorphism as a means to display the nature of the character visually by matching their personality with the animal most associated with that behavior, could still likely have the stories told if the characters were all human. Because they behave exactly like humans do in the stories.
I'm aiming for more of a science-fiction-themed basis, where the characters may have *some* human traits, but their behaviors, nature and even society at large, simply could not exist if they were human. I am treating them more as an alien species than anything else; a parallel reality where a completely different sort of society and population came to dominance, rather than what we have here.
That was largely why I decided to put the Penance story out first before I release Caterwaul. In her story, *she* is the alien on a world not her own, and must learn about the world and it's "rules" just as you or I would if we were in the same situation. Even upon her arrival there, it's shown that the words on signs are completely incoherent to her (as well as the reader), as she has never seen (or heard) the languages spoken on that planet. It's not until she starts pulling information out of others that she, as well as the reader, begins to understand the words in both speech and writing. By doing this, I can introduce the reader to this new world at the ground floor, and show them that while there are similarities between here and there, they are, at most, superficial similarities. It was the only way I could figure out how to explain to folks that the world of Caterwaul/Skunkworks is not necessarily like our own.
--JMH
Received on Sat Mar 01 2014 - 23:34:44 CST