The Archives: Vol. 1
In which I talk about the work from my past
When I’m feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world or my own circumstances, I do this thing. I want to retreat and remove myself from society.
I want to delete all traces of myself from the Internet, return home to Texas, and disappear into a hole. I don’t want anybody to ever talk to me again or even remember that I’ve existed.
Sometimes it starts with me deactivating my Instagram or considering erasing my personal site. I start to panic about everything I’ve released, shared, or engaged with. And on really bad days, I have deleted work that I knew I could never retrieve again.
So when I come out of it, some weeks later, feeling either marginally better or significantly so and wanting to make new work, I regret so much.
Lately, things have been feeling scary and a little impossible so those feelings have come up but some thoughts have led me to push back against my pattern reaction.
Number one: I have this memory of sitting in front of the TV in 2008 listening to people talk about the market crashing. One boy at school cried over losing a vacation home earlier in the day. I asked my mom how it would affect us. She just shrugged her shoulders.
“We’re always in a recession,” she said. “They only start to panic when it affects white people.”
While whatever is happening now seems significantly worse, I am keeping that in mind today while I’m watching everybody wring their hands over what’s going to happen next. The economy has always sucked for me. Just keep going.Number two: I don’t remember where I read this, but someone said something along the lines of: “whenever you're feeling down, first try doing the opposite of what you typically do to cope.”
If you wanna rot bed all day, preface it by going for a walk. If you want to stuff your face with greasy fast food, cook a small appetizer in the kitchen. And in this case, since I want to dig a hole and die in it, I’m instead going to share all the work I’ve made first.
I’ve realized I can’t do this in one single post, which is kind of cool. So I’m gonna make it a series. And then when I’m done, I either will or will not decide to start living with the mole people.
First off, I’m gonna start with a series that I got to create with someone a few years ago. But then we’re gonna go back to the other projects, including some work I’ve commissioned and a literary magazine I created where other people shared great work.
I won’t share it all because I’m not quite there yet. But I do enjoy providing context.
Shadow-Starrs on Deck
Back in 2022, I expanded upon a show idea created by my friend Danny. He had the characters and art in mind already, but he didn’t have too much surrounding the backstory. He also wanted to work with a Black writer specifically so the characters were authentic. So we dove into it all together and I was officially a co-creator.
It was about the Shadow-Starrs: “a motley crew, and a loving family! Two bright kids and their (secretly) former space pirate parents travel the galaxy on an adventure, drifting across space and unknowingly pursued by the parents' ex-crewmate with a bitter grudge.”
It was the first (and only) show I had worked on after embarking on my animation writing journey and it was my own. It was very cool. Just short-lived.
Anyone who has ever heard me talk about this show knows how severely disappointed I was in the Warner Brothers-Discovery merger. Just a month after getting feedback from our family and friends and less than a week after we pitched, it was announced that the newly-named WBD would be moving away from kids content. (Insert sad trombone.)
It didn’t take too long for that to happen. The executive we were speaking to moved on (for lack of a better word). We did make an effort to find it a new home but the show was written for a specific era of Cartoon Network that was quickly coming to a close. It didn’t match other spaces too well so Danny and I shuttered the project.
I, at least, got a decent script out of it and it got praise from Rebecca Sugar, his former boss. I’m still riding that high.
I still think about what Shadow-Starrs on Deck could’ve been. We had fun making it and planning the memes but it was certainly my first hard lesson in the animation industry: do not get attached.
First, you’ll have to make it past the pitch. We barely did.
Then, assuming you make it into development, your original idea could be shifted into something completely different from what you originally intended.
Lastly, throwing your soul into something meant to please an ever-changing audience can be a mistake. While you should put your heart in it, people will take what they want from your art. You cannot and should not try to please everyone.
I’ve tried to leave the show in the past a bit because it’s hard to think about (see the intro of this post). It wasn’t a personal failure, just a sign of the changing times. We were also not the only show that got the chop that year and subsequent ones. Others were much further along in the process with entire crews laid off or years of work scrapped.
On occasion, I will get the urge to pitch it after a general meeting but the state of the industry has made me hesitant to have my dreams crushed again.
Instead, if I grit my teeth and clench my fist, the feeling will pass and I can make myself say something like: “actually, we were pretty lucky.”