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gorast · 2 years

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Back in February 2021, shortly after posting “What do you know about time?”, I had an idea.

Realistically, it was probably pretty heavily influenced by things I was reading and watching at the time - I think WandaVision was a big culprit in that regard. But after putting together that strip, I started to think about the implications of what Lihp was saying - the idea that the comic, since the very beginning, had never taken place in reality, the way one might assume that any of those shitty sprite comics from the early 2000s were assumed to be real, in their own bespoke universes. Obviously, when I was 11 years old, I didn’t give a shit about any of this - I wanted to make a sprite comic that got me fame and influence within the Bionicle fandom, and I put the absolute minimum amount of effort towards achieving that goal. Revisiting it all, 15 years after the last comic, the bizarre, hastily-cobbled-together continuity Life with Phil created fascinated me, and it made me want to take the whole thing much more seriously.

Because it started so simply - one comic on 8/10 in 2020, done entirely on a whim while I was in a voice call. When I made it, I figured that I would make one every year, for at least a few years, to commemorate the day, and that would be that. Plans changed when I realized that 2021 would be the 20th anniversary of the start of the Bionicle line, and an annual comic quickly became monthly, then weekly, as I became more and more enthusiastic about the project. It was basically going to remain a weekly gag comic, maybe with a more cohesive overarching narrative owing to the fact that I wasn’t a drooling idiot child any more, but nothing all that serious. When I wrote “What do you know about time?”, however, everything changed, and I set out to make that vision a reality.

The broad strokes of Life with Phil’s narrative were set in stone from the beginning - Phil would dick around for a while as he begins to realize that things aren’t what they seem, we would have a diversion with the guest star tour that would be as long as it needed to be, Lihp’s Big Lie would be revealed, he would beat her ass, and he would escape the white space, returning to - surprise! - Mata Nui, the real Mata Nui, ripped straight from the Mata Nui Online Game. I had a set of extremely vivid images in my head, too - the Mega Toa Nuva reveal was locked in about a week after I shifted the focus of the comic, as was the end of the main story, that of Phil emerging on Mata Nui, bright and vibrant. The rest of it, the middle parts joining the big plot beats together, was put together pretty much on the fly, as I began pivoting the tone of the comic from dumb gag comic into something a little bit more mysterious.

Looking back, I’m not sure if it hit the way I wanted it to - I wanted the new elements to be just a little unsettling to start, mixing the decreasing volume of jokes with weird elements that felt incongruous, that were meta or just plain inscrutable, as the scope began to expand, as Phil realized - ideally in real time with the reader - that something fucking weird was going on in the background. I wanted Lihp to take center stage the way she never had in the original comic, because I felt like there was something there, something that my stupid child brain had no ability to tap into. The dark mirror image of the protagonist is a common trope in media, especially as part of an origin story - this is an MCU callout post - and another common element of that was that the protagonist, in some way, created their own biggest enemy, that they were responsible for the misfortune being dumped on them by that villain. So, what if Phil literally created Lihp? Everyone else, I decided, would be “real,” based on a Matoran (or Toa, I guess, Imatron) from the actual Mata Nui, ported into the white space. But Lihp would have no real life analogue. Lihp would be the lynchpin of the white space, the center point around which everything revolved, even if no one - herself included, at first - was aware of it.

So the scope expanded, and rapidly started to get out of hand, relative to my original expectations. I had delusions of finishing this comic in August 2021, December at the latest, to set it fully within the commemorative context of Bionicle’s 20th year. That, obviously, didn’t happen, a combination of the comic’s scale growing beyond expectations and my own struggles to keep the momentum going, especially as the comic began to run long. Looking at the creation and modified dates for the comics in my files, Life with Phil’s second run was the product of 12 bursts of creativity for it - some just a few days, where I would grind comics out one after the other, a few running over the course of a month, as I made comics basically in real time, without much of a buffer to work with. I think the first time I hit a real snag was around the guest star tour, where it started to really feel like a grind, just pushing forward to get to the season finale, making sure it landed right on 8/10. From that point on, I knew I was closer to the end than the start, but I had more and more issues keeping up the desire to work on…well, anything, really. The worst stretch was February to April 2022, where I worked on literally nothing at all, for the comic or for anything else. Getting through that was the hardest part, but I emerged on the other side nearly at the end of the comic, and, fortunately, I managed to keep it just long enough to get to the end.

There’s a lot I’m proud of with this comic - the Life with Lihp arc was enormous fun to put together, as I revisited the season 1 comics to riff on them and play with expectations, a bit of a fun reprieve before the plot came crashing back in with “Get me the hell away from these people.” And, of course, there was the introduction of Mega Toa Nuva proper back into the comic right after that, a moment I’d wanted to be the peak of the comic - the “oh shit” moment where the big guns finally arrive, and the real shit can begin. I chose MT because of the curious position he held in the original comic; most of the characters featured, including a few of the regulars, were based on people I interacted with on Mask of Destiny at the time. I look back fondly on the people I remember, like Bionicle_Master (BM), like AgentA, like Imatron, like BiDrake, even KK (let’s sidestep the Kaosu Buntai stuff for him). But I gotta tell you, I don’t remember a god damn thing about Megatoanuva, and yet this guy was Phil’s best friend in the comic. He must have meant a lot to me at the time, and I wanted to respect that, which is why he’s given such prominence in the endgame. He becomes Phil’s biggest cheerleader, his most important support, and yet, in the end, it’s Phil who saves him, not the other way around, showing that Phil has, in fact, grown, developed, changed in the white space. Become a hero.

The technical aspects were another thing I found myself taking pride in as the comic went along, too. Changing sprite sizes, manually editing sprites into poses that weren’t ripped straight from Razor’s sprite sheet, occasionally making new assets, loading up GIMP for more complex visual effects - as the comic continued, and the plot became larger and more serious, I wanted the visual style of the comic to subtly evolve with it. I wanted to play with the format, expand beyond six panels, beyond the comic’s typical aspect ratio. In that regard, I’m most proud of “*CLICK*”, “Everything is Mine,” and “Goodbye,” all of which relied on GIMP for their visual effects. The epilogue, too, was heavily a product of GIMP. I didn’t want to just dump raw MNOG screenshots into the comic to use as backgrounds - I don’t know why, but I wanted them to look affected in some way, and after messing around with the options I had, I settled on using dithering to make the images feel just a little bit degraded, like a nostalgia filter overlaid on the comic, to make the sprites pop out more from the backgrounds. Putting the epilogue comics together was an adventure in its own right, and if anyone saw my paneling process for those, phew, you’d be deeply disappointed in me. Just horrendous. It’s done, now, however, so there can’t be any consequences for me. Good news!

I’ll be honest with you - there were a lot of points during the making of this comic where, if you traveled back in time to tell me that I would actually see it through to the end, I probably would’ve laughed it off. Making it to the originally planned ending of this comic is a huge accomplishment for me - I haven’t finished a project of this scale in years. It took supreme discipline, and plenty of self-care and forgiveness for missteps, for me to emerge on the other side with a finished product. And it was only eight months late! What a steal!

All in all, I think it’s fair for me to be proud of myself. It’s just a silly little sprite comic, but it’s mine, a tether between the person I am now and the wide-eyed child I used to be, goofing off on an under-moderated Bionicle forum, forging connections that would transcend time and space. I think, for a long time, I didn’t really realize or understand how foundational a text Bionicle is for me - this is the literal bedrock of my media consumption, a franchise that informed my taste in stories and storytelling from the very beginning, the first long-term story I ever engaged with, from the day I first received Onua as a gift from my dad in 2001 to now, where I’ve just wrapped up a Bionicle-based sprite comic. Bionicle is love, Bionicle is life, and both of those things are canon. To engage with it so deeply again, if only for a little whlie…it was nice. Maybe I needed it.

So that was Life with Phil. A sprite comic, raised from the dead, given new purpose, finally fulfilling its destiny, after all these years. Thanks to a lot of people - to the members of the Purple Note server that put up with me posting these stupid comics for two years, to Sue and Rayg for being good sports about being featured guests for the second run, to BM, to AgentA, to all those original guest stars (except Hapori Tohu, fuck you) who so enthusiastically wanted to be featured, lending their support to the comic, wherever they may be (hope you’re all okay), to GaliGee, the legend, for inspiring me to write Bionicle stories, to Dark709 for inspiring me to make sprite comics, to Marty “Razor” Kirra for creating the sprite set that I shamelessly used for my comics in 2004 and 2021, and to Megatoanuva, a best friend lost to time like so many others.

And now, we rest. Until it’s time to wake up, anyway.

#2022 #epilogue #comic

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gorast · 2 years

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