You are currently reading pages from Chapter two (of three),
– go here for the First chapter – Friday.
– Previous pages in Chapter two – Saturday
– or go back to the beginning of Saturday.
By and large – the most enjoyable and satisfying part of doing a wordy comic are the silent bits.
Go here for the next pages – 69-72
I s’pose technically this comic is mostly silent bits as there is narration as written by the main character, which is separate from the images BUT the nicest bits to draw were the quiet parts with no words. I figure that it also gives the reader a bit of a reprieve and some silence to digest the intense flow of ideas, and perhaps what is happening. It also helps to remind me and the reader that the place this is set in is Alice Springs …and there’s lots of places and people floating in and around the desert-town in the worn-down nubs of the Macdonnell ranges.
Silent comics are not things that I’ve ever done much of … but there is a different focus when it’s about movement, action and dynamism are fun too … I haven’t had much of them in this comic … just a few moments here and there to punctuate the stillness, which reminds me living in Alice. Long weeks of seeming stillness, but acts of violence or extreme behaviour occurring in some strange symbiosis with the quiet. Perhaps that’s why I found the place so intoxicating – it’s … quite frankly … a surreal place to live.
When I flew or drove home to Melbourne from the desert to visit my parents, mum used to listen to me talking and tell me that I should “write this all down” because I would forget it. It was only in those moments that I realised that I had a pretty bizarre job and life in the outback. The humdrum of doing a job can fool you into thinking that everyone experiences things like you.
I just finished reading the USA’s Anders Nilsen’s monolithic Big Questions … I can almost not believe the world he created in that extraordinarily beautiful masterwork of comics … go and get it – it’s bloody big, but if you’re into silence and mood it’s truly magnificent.
Joshua Santospirito Art 
love the “silent comics” concept, and the way you did it