I don't really have "abandoned" ideas. I just have ideas I wanna do something with some day, whenever I get the time, so they're sitting around waiting until I get the spare time to work on them. And my gosh, are there a LOT of those.
Like this idea I had for a man travelling through a desert country, who builds a golem out of sand. It's an adventure story, after a fashion, but it's got this philosophical spin on it, debating how you define "humanity" and to what extent it is morally right for a creator to control his creations, etc.
Or that one idea I have for a superhero story, in which the heroine wears sensible shoes and a warm sweater, because it's
cold outside at night, damnit, and her parents are still alive and very few people have superpowers, and she's not one of them, and maybe there's this one guy who is a vigilante because he came back from the wars and can't quite get used to the idea of not living in a warzone any more. Also, antagonists who are in the moral greyzone, because I like that.
Or the one I mentally refer to as the animist-story, in which a shaman/animist of a tribe living on a huge grassy plain uses her connection to the spirit-world to solve mysteries, defend her tribe from external aggression, and protect the land she lives on. This is an idea I've actually worked a bit on; I've done a 16-page one-shot called
Waystone, just to test the waters a bit, but I wanna explore it further, and deal with things like colonisation and exploitation of aboriginal peoples, among other things.
This story shares a universe with my first finished graphic novel Fathoms of the Sky, though they do not intersect at all, beyond the fact that people belonging to the shaman's ethnic group show up in the background of Fathoms.
Or that one idea for a comic strip about librarians, called
Friends of Littleville Library, which is on the backburner until I a.) get more time to work on it, and b.) come to terms with the idea of drawing bookshelves in every panel forever.
And, of course, my scifi universe. I've been drawing little one-shots set in it for a while now - one of which was even published in a professional magazine! - but I don't have an overarching story for it yet. And maybe that's fine, I don't know; maybe it'll just be oneshots forever. That's okay too. Anyway, it's a scifi setting that is 100% free from straight, white, cisgendered men - not because I hate straight, white, cisgendered men, but because they are over-represented in science fiction, and I wanna draw space adventures without them.
Speaking of scifi stories - there's
Mirrorworld, too - which unlike the scifi universe above isn't set in space, but
is set on a near-future earth, where humanity has found a way to move between our world and a close parallell universe - and it's all about oppressive governments, mega-corporations gaining too much influence in the daily lives of people, identity and the loss thereof, and the value of rebellion.
.... And those are just the ones I have proper pictures of. I did one of those 100-characters memes a while ago, and actually ran out of space on the chart. My problem has always been too many ideas, rather than the opposite.
I'm trying to do this thing now where I keep Grassblades as my main project, and try to do at least one smaller project on the side at the same time. It won't always be a comic as a sideproject, but it'll be something, which means I can maybe start crossing things off the list, and not just add to it.
It's been going okay so far, and I hope to keep it up!
