I NEARLY did a comic about the 'AU' that my characters inhabit when I'm not working on this one. In fact, it wasn't just the characters in my current comic that lived there, but the majority of my other characters, too.
See, I wanted to do a comic set in my modern-day home town (Portland, Oregon), except instead of just humans, it's inhabited by all sorts of other creatures, too, as an urban fantasy setting. It was an 'open' urban fantasy, though -- magic was well-known, and in broad use (although the 'how' gets complicated). So there wasn't a big 'OMG magic is REAL?!?' revelation, no one trying to keep the existence of dragons a secret or something... THAT wasn't the big secret lurking under the surface. I won't go into detail, but I'm still hugely fond of the idea, and there's a lot more I haven't mentioned.
I spent a couple of years trying to hammer out the plot and details for that story, and eventually I had to give up for two reasons:
1. It was just too huge. I'd have been following a MINIMUM of ten different main characters, and close to 40 supporting/side characters. On top of that, the plot was enormous, with absolutely cataclysmic stakes. I... didn't feel like it was a good place to start.
2. Given that it was going to be set in an existing city, the amount of accuracy I would've had to put into my art seemed daunting. It's one thing to draw a convincing city street-- it's another to draw a SPECIFIC city street that people encounter all the time. I didn't want to try it at all if I couldn't do it right.
I do miss things about it, though. I miss the grand scale of it in my head. I miss the godawful puns I had planned for the chapter titles. I miss some of the characters I built especially for that AU. And I miss the built-in marketing opportunities I would've had -- hey folks! Read this comic that's set in your own city!
Yeah. Maybe someday.
