about hole boy the process about VOID VOID annotated comments credits about the author

Steel Kisses Skin on the Wrist At about midnight on May 20, 1996, I woke up from bed crying and screaming after getting only two hours of sleep. I walked over to the kitchen, pulled a knife out of the drawer, and ran the flat side of the blade up and down my wrists for about an hour. hole boy is about that night and the two-month period surrounding it. Conceiving the Computer-Generated Comic I've always wanted to do an entirely computer-generated comic. The tools were all there: I've owned a Wacom drawing tablet and Painter for about a year and a half, and I've been writing HTML ever since NCSA Mosaic 2.0. The purpose and motivation to take on such a project, though, weren't there. I was convinced that if I were to ever do a computer-generated comic, it wouldn't be a little gimmicky one-shot cutesy short. Mediocre and unimaginative "HTML comics" already exist on the web in abundance; they do no justice to either comics as an art or HTML as an untapped creative medium. No, if I was going to do an HTML comic, I was going to do it right, I was going to do it well, and I was going to do it BIG. The opportunity finally presented itself in the form of a very deep depression, which I guess was a creative blessing (but a real pain in the ass to deal with for four months). About a week after my chicken-out suicide attempt, the character came to me in a series of sketches. There was no real storyline in my mind, and none ever really took shape. I believe that, because of this, the comic suffers from some incoherence, a solid beginning, and a lack of real closure; however, I also believe that this shapeless approach to the storyline reflected the nature of my depression. I can't exactly pinpoint when it began, and it's hard to say when it ended (if it truly has ended by the time of this writing). The final result, then, is a series of episodes showing you only fragments of hole boy's life; you don't know why he's depressed or what becomes of him, but you empathize with him (or at least I hope you empathize with him). Back to top of page