Background and Inspiration

Hey all or anyone who takes a stroll here.

Snow Daze is a combined effort with my artist and creative confederate Marcus.  It's a bit of a strange venture, a little odd in tone, but something that has edges and definition.  We are slow in production because life commands it.

I thought it'd be interesting to provide some background for the elements demonstrated within the pages you've hopefully been keeping up with.  So here goes.

This is a comic about brown younguns.  I've always liked the idea of absurdly mature youngsters...not because I think that people aren't forced to grow old beyond their relative birthdate, but the fact is that young people are more mature than generally depicted.  As a young person my head was heavy with responsibilities and struggled perspectives.  I knew others like me and I knew plenty others NOT like me; we all mature at a different mph and for drastically different reasons.

The reality of Snow Daze is a convoluted one, for certain.  I like using broad strokes and then alternating to fine brushes when I write (to provide a visual allegory), and I think adolescence employs similar tools.  Nolo and his crew represent that definitive entrepreneurial spirit that inhabits certain younger individuals.  Simultaneously, Nolo and certain others speak with a certain stylized gravity that contradicts their relative age.  But they are still not adults and remain affected by the culture and confining geography of their young lives.

I've always been a very big fan of Rian Johnson's high-school-noir masterpiece Brick, and it's been a decided inspiration for this story and world.  Not saying that I hope to ape his film (and check out the novelization pdf, which is excellent), which I argue is somewhat monolithic in its perhaps invented genre, but I immediately understood its exaggerations minutes into it.  It took itself seriously, even as many of its scenes were somewhat silly and excessively melodramatic.  When it was funny - the scene with The Pin's mom, Tug struggling in the kitchen, etc - it wasn't funny by mistake, it was funny because it pointed to the absurdity of young people playing as adults concerned with mortality.  Except, on returning to that notion, you realize that young people may know more about mortality than we give them credit for.  Laugh and then pause.

I hope that aspects of Snow Daze are humorous, and not by happenstance.

This is a race story, a noirish tale, a crime epic, a two-fisted adventure, in a city being filled with breathing characters.  Marcus and I cannot fucking wait to turn you on to some of the wilder moments we're devising.  This has been a long time coming but we assure you that we will deliver something unique and involved, and like nothing else on the shelf.

Stay tuned, issue 1 is almost out the door.

-Leo-