Theresa's depictions of Mookie continue to delight, he really is a guy who wears his thoughts on his sleeves.
I'll need to do something awesome for our 100th update...I think I'll release a bunch of images of the monsters that Theresa and I have dreamt up for starters. You'll be able to see the different ways we imagined Iss-Nagish and her mortal avatar Nageeshi.
I've had the idea of Iss-Nagish in the back of my head for years now, it's crazy to finally start to bring her out to the public. The first concept I had of her was around 5 years ago when I was trying to write a horror film that I could produce on a post college budget. Initially it was vaguely blair witch-y in nature, the monster was a witch who was wrapped up in/composed of black slimy ropey bits. I figured I would use wet black yarn for the practical effects.
The main characters would find bits of yarn in their house, or at their desk at work, and whenever they would pull the thread it would reveal more and more string, and they could follow it (and of course would) all the way to the witche's house. There they would encounter a huge pile of dirty rags and strings and ropes, and from those would rise up from the floor, my monster.
Eventually I pivoted a bit, she wasn't just some witch, she was an Elder God who existed in the higher dimensions, able to see all the timelines of our universe.
The threads were still there, and if you followed them once again you would find her. I wrote a short story about a man lost in the NYC subway tunnels who comes across all these giant spider silk sacks. He rips one open to find another version of himself inside, dead. He realizes that the re-occuring nightmares he's been having about being captured and eaten by a spider were really him watching other versions of himself get killed every night.
I dropped the short story because I had a really hard time finding the main character's voice. I tried to pivot again, and write a feature length horror film. The twist was that it would pull a "Psycho" and kill the main character within 30-40 minutes. Then another version of that main character in another alternate universe would wake up from a horrible nightmare about being killed by a spider. The film would feature 3 different versions of the same main character, one of which who figures out that her dreams were real, and that they could help her escape from the dangerous people coming after her. I called the film Ragdoll, and still like the idea, but I wasn't quite sure how to sustain the story for 90 pages. Still might be doable though, maybe someday...
Finally we come to this comic! Iss-Nagish has been rattling away in my brain for years, and so the moment I decided to start a comic book in a Lovecraftian universe I knew she would have to be in it. Initially I intended to build towards her as kind of the penultimate encounter my heroes would face, but then I remembered that Elder Gods almost never interact with mortals. That would be like an ant expecting an astronaut to drop by and say hello.
So instead I decided to build up the cult around her, the 1920's lunatics who are aware of the spacetime continuum well before Einstein, and who use Iss-Nagish's proverbial table scraps to cause a lot of damage.
Theresa Chiechi's (The Artist @la-fumettista) website is here: http://www.theresachiechi.com/
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