What Sorcery was that?
Sorcery (now on the Sunday comics page) began as a very simple idea - Different scenes playing out in front of a static wall. I thumbnailed it just a few days after the idea hit me, began drawing it that same week, and premiered it along with the newsletter not long after.
It’s a hybrid comic strip (updated and displayed in threes) and stage play centering on the very loose idea of a modern city where sorcery is common and its effects are seen without explanation. A commuter is headed to a job where he maybe serves as a sort of wizard psychiatrist, a kid puffs on a forbidden magic pipe they likely stole from a rebellious older sibling, and a lady makes an anxious phone call on a device that had just appeared (where the phone came from, who knows) - All while the fallout of an ominous clash displayed on the wall behind them spills into their world.
This is all basically as it appeared in the thumbnails, minus one segment with a gang of criminal sorcerers and apprentices (called The Glitter Guts in my notes). I liked their little scenes (seen below) but their energy was too aggressive to show up before the Turmoil segment, and too silly to appear during or after. Maybe I’ll do something else with them some day.
This series was really fun to work on, but man, I got sick of looking at that wall (one of the reasons it got torn down). I’ll likely replace the feature, which was essentially an open secret I’d only link to in the newsletter, with something new soon. Whether that’ll be another little comics experiment I don’t know yet. But hey, I hope you fellows enjoyed my weird little play!
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Here’s Francis and the Lights’ See Her Out, the lyrics of which appear in the comic.
