The Adventures of Blisterfish- Updates Fridays

I’ve always wanted to draw a magical-girl-style transformation sequence. This comes pretty close, I think.

I’d like to talk about the future of the comic a bit here. When I first offered Kay to take over drawing it for them (about three years ago now, astoundingly), they told me that they wanted me to keep the comic going for as long as I was enjoying it, and no longer. Over the past couple years since Kay passed, drawing Blisterfish has helped me process their passing and at times still feel close to them. However, I also realized that at the rate I’m able to draw it, I would never be able to finish the amount of story Kay had plotted out within the expected span of my lifetime — even if I worked on only Blisterfish, to the exclusion of any other creative projects. I know Kay would not want that for me.

Drawing this chapter (Chapter Four, the same one I first started when Kay handed me the reigns while they were in treatment) has been humbling, but also a nice reminder of what an incredible artist Kay was, that they were able to finish three other chapters (much faster than I finished this one, and some of them during their cancer treatments). I’d love to work on Blisterfish alongside other projects, but (1) I don’t have time to juggle multiple projects given my full-time day-job, and trying to do so leads to making no progress on any of them; and (2) I would feel pretty bad knowing that I would still likely never finish it. Of course, I could try to give it an ending earlier than Kay intended, but that feels wrong, for reasons that probably relate to Kay’s death.

That’s not even getting into the fact that for this chapter, I was working from Kay’s thumbnails and therefore not having to write any dialogue or block out scenes. Kay left broad plans for the rest of the story, relayed during frequent conversations we had in their final days which I recorded. I don’t think they did this imagining that I was going to spend the next several decades drawing the whole story, but out of a desire for the story to be told. I felt confident enough in my draftsmanship to work from Kay’s thumbnails, even though the results of course look different from their own pages. However, I don’t think I’d be able to write Blisterfish convincingly, and I recoil at the thought of it continuing *without* Kay’s inimitable sense of humor. (In a way, drawing from their thumbnails was ideal in that it allowed their greatest strengths to shine through in the finished work: their mastery of pacing — comedic and otherwise — their keen attention to body language, and their wonderful and entertaining dialogue.) So, I’ll be leaving the story here at the end of this chapter, about ten pages from this one. Of course, I could pick it up again in the future, but I imagine I’ll be working on developing other ideas, which I think is what Kay would want for me.

That said! I know Kay knew a lot of comic artists other than me. If someone else wants to draw a chapter, I have all the thumbnails and their notes for the Chapter Five. Just hit me up. It could be a fun sort of tribute, having lots of folks draw pages. Just an idea 🙂

Thank you for reading, and for keeping Kay in your thoughts. To those of you who knew Kay, which I have to assume is almost all of you, thank you for your kind words over the course of this chapter! Since I knew Kay from middle/high school and we didn’t always stay in touch, it was so great coming back into their life and meeting the community they had made for themselves. Their capacity for friendship was one of their great gifts, and I’ve seen that every time I’ve interacted with the amazing folks they knew from college and from life thereafter. We take their light forward.

-Graham