The second page I roughly sketched out (with some blanks) was the one where I wanted to introduce the main character DARIA DEVIL charging down the hallways of the Nazi headquarters in order to rain death and revenge upon the faschist leaders. She was looking for Gaumann and his henchmen to send them forever to Nazi heaven. Whatever that might be. Probably something out of a Wagner opera.

While Corona got our societies by the neck in late 2021 I was locked away in my flat and on occasion went out for long walks in the woods and further hoarding of toilet paper and dark chocolate. Every place I frequented in the past (mostly to drown myself in caffeine) was shut down and the slightest cough made me abandon any relationship for weeks. Of course that's not entirely true, I had long conversations with my friends on the phone and via messengers, but I wiped screens and keyboards afterwards just in case the virus secretly developed a digital variant. Even started to use my old headset again (wished it to be wireless at that time).

Besides practicing my ass off on the saxophone by transcribing Ferdinand Povel Solos (great dutch tenor player, beautiful lines, boring music) and painstakingly transposing them through all twelve keys at tempos so slow it felt like eternal foreplay, I enjoyed the wiped clean calendars, the tabula rasa of timetables and schedules. No gigs, no projects, no arguing with the wrong people over the right songs to play.

Other than that there wasn't much to do and after I binged several times in a row through every New Hollywood movie that Netflix or Prime had on their shelves (probably five all together, two of them were the same and one only in Kraut synchro) I found myself on my couch having bad body odor and doodling away on my iPad. I'm sure that during Covid this scenery repeated itself in at least every one and a-half single household in the world. Maybe not in China.

While I was walking in circles through my flat stirred up and failing to come up with something worthy of my drawing skills and lack of proper education, training and most of all persistence, I had the dumbest idea despite having no expertise in that field whatsoever: make a comic.

The hubris, the cacophony of presumptuousness in this guy!!!

I am not a cynic, Covid was a tragedy for a lot of people, who lost dear friends and family members or kids being traumatized by sharing a roof with their parents 24/7 and the non-existence of a healthy sex life for said parents. I guess I was lucky in that randomized fuck-up of death and separation. But nevertheless I'm still the self-centered class clown I was in school (and be legitimately hated for that), who puts himself smartly on the spectrum of irony and sarcasm, just to be untouchable by lesser beings. I had a great time during the pandemic. Boredom revealed the true nature of manhood: blunt, unadulterated, wet-noodled delussions of greatness. No one there to judge, to humble, to put my bloated self-surrounding me and my egotistic daydreaming into place. Finally, I was free!

Back to my intial topic! The second page expectedly shows a very distinctive lack of planning ahead, leaping straight off the cliff instead of grabbing the parachute first, then stepping onto the ledge and wisely decide to hike down the mountain. Everything was already way too detailed for a rough outline of the story and took hours to make. But at least the work killed time, boredom and seemed to cool down my swollen sex chakra. Or should I call it "brain"? Or maybe one of my OF-Favourites was finally dropping some content. God, I hate when it happens simultaneously!

- A.

Anyways, meet our protagonist: