Welcome to my Good Taste blog! I hope to post here frequently about the processes, the characters, the back stories, and once the comic gets to the end I'll also tell you what happens to the characters after that final “THE END.” But that will be eons from now, seeing as the comic is looking to be around 300 pages.

How it got started:

It started as a role-playing game/writing partnership between myself and my friend, Larklight. Although I'm not really sure now how the characters came about and for what reasons. Miss Mary, Spencer, Four, Lane, Kellan, and Adrienne have been around for about five? years? And thank you very much to Larklight for allowing me to run amok with her characters, specifically, Four, Adrienne and Kellan. Everyone else you have to blame me for!

(The character Mercer and the Coil sisters were invented for the comic, and Wednesday and an upcoming Declan were random extras that I elevated to mainer characters. Mainer? Is that a word?)

Yeah, but comic?:

So there are a lot of stories that we've typed up for fun about these characters, but why the hell would I want to make a comic about them? It's a pretty STUPID STORY. Well, first because I wanted to do something with these characters that I could show the world. They've been hiding in e-mail boxes and MSN chats for five billion years and as I was getting more into comic making it seemed a natural progression.

Secondly, and more stupidly, I decided to make a comic as a kind of “alternate dimension” where people got together with who I wanted them to be with, everyone was happy, nobody committed suicide at the age of 40. Kind of like a fanfiction on my own work. But then as I started working on the comic, thinking up scenes, I realised that even if I wanted them to be happy and fulfilled and not-dying the characters wouldn't allow it. And even though it frustrated me because it made the comic much more complex, long, and involved, at the same time I'm grateful that the comic will be much more complex, long, and involved. And, hopefully, more interesting.

Influences!:

It would be remiss of me not to mention the influences of Good Taste. Not only the influences on Good Taste, but also my comic making in general.

One perhaps obvious influence is anime/manga. I used to be huge into it, but now I only read Yotsuba&! Yotsuba is a delightful comic about a little girl, Yotsuba, who goes about living her daily life. Each chapter is titled something like Yotsuba & … Global Warming! Yotsuba & … The Farm! And so on. Kind of like how each chapter of Good Taste, is “Good Taste in … Music”. The material is VASTLY different, but the influence is definitely there in the story-telling.

Now I'm more into American/indie comics. I've been influenced the most by Linda Medley's Castle Waiting and Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise.

Cheers!