kizamis | my comic's bittersweet origins (Reply)

some miserable intro

i been reading old blog posts from when i was a teenager and like. idk some personal stuff i been realisin but also like. idk. i don't wanna think about it, like. at all. i think it's making me realise i've always been a never-ending spiral of shit-eating misery. but whatever. ignore real life and how bad it is and always has been and will be and FOCUS ON SOME OC SPERGING. WHO KNOWS HOW MUCH LONGER I'LL BE ABLE TO WRITE ABOUT OCS. who knows how much longer i'll be able to write at all.

ANYWAYS OC TIME YAYYYYY.

ok so before i started writing my comic, psyche!, it had a proto story that i still have scant traces of digital art for. it was called "black rose" and i wrote it during classes in like 7th-8th grade. it was a shoujo-inspired kinda story. it was about your average japanese high school boy named daisuke atsuya and his stalker-friend-crush named rinako. the general plot was that on his way to summer school, he happens upon a pair cat/rabbit hybrids. one upbeat and one very pensive. the upbeat one, minako (HMMMMMMMM), says she's looking for someone to be the saviour of her world. daisuke gets dragged into the past by accident thru a portal they open up and he accidentally revives a princess, shizuka, and her enemy, ZAN, from a deep slumber. he learns shizuka is an alternate version of rinako and that he's been transported to the 1800s version of his current world. these cat/rabbit hybrids are supposed to protect shizuka along with her personal guard and servant, kaoru. that was the basic story.

i used to have spirals of the original comics but moving so much recently has made me lose those. SIGHSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. anyway. anyways, through looking at my old archives, i post a lot of short stories, black rose being one of them. i basically have everything i originally wrote archived on there. one fun thing is, rei was originally always named rei (because the story took place in japan. i was 14-15 when writing it ok), whereas in the original draft for psyche! her name was lindsey. but then i changed her named after meeting someone named lindsey (i wrote about that experience previously before) so she became rei. i ended up adding too much to victor's history so now he's extremely mixed but whatever! originally he was german and hated americans and women. heh. funny.

sooooooo i ended up finding something else in those archives.

aaaaa viruses scary

i had severe mental issues regarding my PC at the time and i was struggling with virus paranoia so i was ironically archiving and saving more than i do now even though i have so much more to work with than i ever originally did. i had printed out my entire first draft to psyche! and i kept those for YEARSSSS. and then we moved in 2016. and i lost all of that work. haha. and then my laptop crashed in 2020 and i lost everything i had written SINCE 2016. my story right now is constructed through whatever archives i could find and memory alone.

all this to say, i was saving my story anywhere i could and these old posts i made as a teen are where i have up to 7 of the original first draft saved. i had gone back and edited old posts to save them there because back then, i didn't know how else to go about archiving stories because google docs wasn't a thing yet so i edited old posts of mine on this blog that had nothing but random gifs and videos i posted that i was also using to archive those for. funnily enough. lmao. again, all this to say, i have these chapters saved. sadly it's only 7 of the literal 60+ chapters i had written, and i remember whenever i made an edit to the story, i'd reprint those copies just to have them in case something ever happened to my PC and i lost my story forever. i'm also able to pull up an archive for only the first chapter of psyche!, out of the 22 that existed at the time. some pages are missing also.

what's funny is the only reason i even started psyche! was because i was looking at an old comic i wrote for black rose and thought it was funny and wanted to do something with the concept again so i decided to rewrite the entire story but with a more developed frontal lobe (a whole barely 2 years later!)

i've always been drawing comics since before i understood what comics even were. i liked writing short stories too and because of the anime boom in my head as a teen, it inspired me to write short stories just rehashes of things i liked. stories about shinigami and time-travelers. this is how psyche! kinda came to be. at some time in late 2008, i changed the story to be set in germany and called märchenland. i only had elizabeth's (renamed from shizuka to anna) concept art done and then ignored the idea again to work on a totally different story in 2009 that would be called pseudonym.

i wanted that comic to be my magnum opus and was heavily based on fruits basket, umineko, and saikano. i have a some art of it around but those original comics are gone too and also only have scant pages i'm able to retrieve from it's archive since i deleted all this shit for being cringe and shit. i don't remember every detail about the story, but here's what i do remember since i've decided to rework this story and one day i'd like to perfect it the way i think i'm doing with psyche!

ABOUT PSEUDONYM

pseudonym was set in england in an unknown time period and about an orphan named nathan adair baxter, who cleans chimneys. he meets a girl with a scorpion's tail attached to her named matanza (because her design literally just came from my current Gaia avatar at the time LOL), who quickly reveals she's a serial killer and begins to use his cleaning expertise to help her remove evidence from her crime scenes and clean them to her specifications. together with her lesbian maid, tiza, they formed a weirdass trio. tiza had a peacock's tail attached to her.

matanza and nathan have a similar tragedy in that both of their parents were killed before the events of the story. i heavily based matanza and tiza's relationship off of camilla, a lesbian foid dracula before moid dracula existed LMAOOOOO. however tiza's feelings were unrequited. nathan meets another orphan that matanza keeps around named llano. she lives in the attic and never does anything. she just exists. matanza's biggest enemy is this corporation that's turned their entire town into smoke and mutating her and tiza and others just like them. the people running it are named alex and his human slave, parfait (her design would be the basis for sidney's original design). matanza breaks into the facility and kills everyone in the building including alex. parfait tries to shoot her and is killed too. after these events, matanza's mental state begins to crumble and she carves a cheshire smile into her face. (I WROTE THIS BEFORE JEFF THE KILLER WAS EVEN A CONCEPT IN THE AUTHOR'S DUMB LITTLE MIND, but yes inspired by dark knight joker ofc).

nathan starts to think he has feelings for matanza. she might be feeling the same so she does things to fuck with his mind and make him miserable to bury the feelings deep and make him leave. somehow llano is killed and tiza goes missing. matanza leaves nathan on his own and fucks off somewhere to find answers for her internal misery and emptiness. nathan gets involved with some family for a short time. this family were a religious cult of their own and the mother and sons of the family tried their best to make nathan as miserable as possible. the youngest daughter becomes obsessed with nathan and due to reasons beyond his control, they entire family is all brutally killed. a cult leader named jacob is a blonde prissy baby who loves matanza. he never makes it onscreen. i had pages and scripts that went beyond this, but i never uploaded past the fallout of nathan's new family being killed. it's revealed somewhere that it was matanza who killed nathan's parents, thus orphaning him, and did it for no other reason than that she's insane. witches were involved somewhere.

i didn't know where the story was going and i was getting bored.
one day i was looking through some of my spirals from school and found a comic i drew for black rose. i thought it was funny and i wanted to do something with these characters again so i revisited the idea of working on that story again. i changed the setting to be modern day america and anna/shizuka became laurie. daisuke became phillip. and rinako became piper. before i even began writing a concept for this new version i had gotten into soul eater and scream franchise, so i changed the names after more brainstorming and it became something more like this...
daisuke > phillip > victor
rinako > piper > sidney,
shizuka > laurie > elizabeth
kaoru > finley
the rabbit/cats > mina and roman
ZAN > faunty
rei > lindsey > back into rei
and a new character was added. scott. and then helen. and then ricky.
daisuke atsuya would become an actual character in the story as someone else entirely and still sporting that varsity jacket i originally drew him in all those years ago. though in this context, it was really only a year or 2 when i began re-working the concept.
the basic plot was the same but with a new flare to it, psychotic beyond average teen boy gets involved in other world shenanigans by accidentally re-awakening a princess and her enemy who were put into a deep slumber for their own protection. however it's no longer an 1800s alternate version of japan, but instead a world inside of mirrors where their reflections reside as living people inside a cursed little town called haddonwest. he's still friends with a stalker who is in love with him except up the ante on the stalker part and give him a bisexual male best friend and some other miscreants.

re-reading these 7 chapters i had archived is very interesting to see where it started and where it's at now. i still have a lot of comics from the different versions of this story and i re-read them sometimes just to see how different it really is now. let's see... originally victor was a psychotic homicidal teen (not much different there), except extremely misogynist, a general piece of shit, and just all around not very appealing as a character as he's a little too... unwell. he was also originally straight and his relationship with scott was queer-baiting as they both ended up with feeeeemales at the end. victor and sidney, and scott and helen. though both of them would have weird relationships with elizabeth who was originally attached to victor for bringing her back. mina and roman are undead creatures from the 70s. roman was always black, but i had one concept piece where mina's skin was peach and green before making them both just green after death. the characters changed a lot over the years but what was the story like originally? well.

STORY SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

it starts off the exact same in all versions. victor arrives home after working and finds his mother passed out drunk on the couch. after some light ribbing between the two (MUCH more hostile in the first draft), he has a conversation with his reflection, keith. (in the first draft his name was just... other victor. loel). psyche! was kind of a collab with a friend of mine at the time but they didn't do much aside from help basic character design, like, victor originally had red hair because daisuke had red hair, but i liked grey. this is where the concept of reflections came from so that i could have both designs. and then... i changed the reflections to be separate looking for plot reasons that i changed later. but in the first draft, the reflections are the exact same except with inverted hair and eye colour (which is a concept i kept because i liked it). victor leaves for school and runs into ricky. they talk about their teacher, mr. D. and then make their way to school. HOWEVERRR, some big changes from the first draft to what i have now. most of this is the same, except in the first draft, elizabeth joins them and acts clingy towards victor. he makes threats towards her and mine and roman chastise him for it. sidney then comes by dressed in all black and smoking, pushes elizabeth aside, and that's our prologue. it transitions to a few weeks before all this happened. this is where the same things happen. victor harasses the school nurse by faking illnesses to get out of his teacher's class, scott comes by with a cat clock and gets punched in the face. victor leaves school and finds sidney in his house, having ditched the entire day to be a weirdo. she says some bullshit in french and then leaves. victor is pulled into the other side by his reflection. he meets someone claiming to be elizabeth, gets dragged into the castle. meets finley, mina, and then roman. shenanigans ensue. mina slips that the true elizabeth is gone. more shenanigans. victor and scott bring her back along with her enemy, faunty. shenanigans. victor meets faunty and is tortured half to death. shenanigans. yeah. also it was 2009 internet so... there were a lot of questionable character moments and just offensive in many ways even for my taste. quite rapey at times and full of rape jokes. of the era, i suppose.

I WANNA POINT OUT SOME BIG, KEY DIFFERENCE IN THE FIRST DRAFT THOUGH. it was directly written to be like scream, self-aware and full of references. however, there are maybe too many references. it's almost fucking annoying reading all of that back. it needed the tone change. it was too goofy and stupid. so, some key plot differences are like finley's necklace. called "the necklace of TerruM". also finley was more gender confused here. elizabeth saw her as a girl, so she was a girl. many others saw her as a boy, so she was a boy. there was no "they/them" back then lmao. as of current canon, she's androgynous presenting, but still a girl. onto her necklace though, it was based on the in universe legend of the witch, terra, and her lover, markus.

...

scott and helen were reincarnations of terra and markus, so helen had a weird witchy backstory. i was basing some of helen's stuff off the psycho-biddie genre of horror movie as well. not really sure why, but whatever. i still wanna repurpose one of those old chapter titles. i wonder if i'll be able to. none of this is spoilers btw because what i have going on with helen now is much different.

the only chapters consistent in all versions of this comic are just three stories: victor and ricky's friendship, mina and roman's tragedy, and veronica and ein's relationship. i'm glad i was able to get to ricky's backstory with victor in the current version of the comic. i did in the first draft, but it was very bad. and i never made it up to there in the 2012 version. i did get to ein and veronica's backstory, and i still own all those pages too! i was using a tracing table and everything. ahh. almost nostalgic to think about the making of that chapter, despite the ongoing irl horrors... i hope i'm able to get to it in the current version, especially with all the changes i've made. the story there is mostly the same however. i've never made it to drawing mina or roman's backstory in either version. it's coming up soon tho in this version. hopefully i can make it. despite the ongoing irl horrors...

this story also had. SOOOOO many alternate endings. i dabbled with the idea of turning it into a visual novel with branching routes because it was becoming beyond my scope. i just couldn't settle on an ending. sometimes i still think about making some kind of game on it. idk.

so yeah, that original story is kind of a giant mess of a someone raised on family guy, anime, and slasher movies (i mean... it still is. but i have more tact now. it's called tact, you fuckrag) LMAO. a lot of this humour just don't fly in a 2026 economy!

also there are 3 versions of psyche! which are the 2009 draft, the 2012 rewrite, and then the 2018 remake.
i could've just shown you these scenes, but they are incredibly bad in these earlier versions and i can't even stand looking at them most of the time, so i'm sparing you from cringe. also i'm too lazy to crop and paste all this shit. anyway, most of these scenes are consistently the same, but there's major story and character differences. i think mina and roman and ricky and fritz are the most consistent from these versions. in general though, the 2009 draft is so drastically different it's basically the same as black rose, in that it's just something that exists to be improved upon later. AND THEN SCRAPPED. it's almost not worth keeping an archive of it. drafts... also i call it a first draft, but this story went through many re-writes as i was writing it because i wanted to complete it before i even started the comic version of it. it's how i typically preferred to do my longer stories. this one was a giant. it originally had somewhere around 60 chapters, then 70, through editing i got it around 50. as of right now, what i have written from 2016, the last edit i was able to make of the story, it had 37 written chapters to it's conclusion. yeah... the comic version is obviously not ending at 37 chapters LMAO. BUT WHO KNOWS, REALLY. anything can happen.

anyways...

i did aaaaall this just to redraw that one little comic that i wrote in 2007, found funny back in 2009... wrote, re-wrote, and then scrapped and remade altogether a story... and thennnnnnn.... I NEVER DID INCORPORATE IT BECAUSE EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED SO MUCH IT WAS NO LONGER CORRELATED TO WHAT I WAS WRITING.
LOL.
LMAO.

there is one scene that i think is still really funny and i would love to incorporate it somehow into the current version of the comic. maybe one day. if i can make it fit tonally.