Ten years ago, I posted the first 2 pages of my webcomic Postcards in Braille:
(yes there is another page before those, but I made that after to give some sort of introduction to new readers)
I actually had these characters floating around for years (since 2008!), but it all came together when I visited my friend Porter in February 2014 and we found this ridiculous phone wallet at Hot Topic:
Dog & Fries became a running joke during my whole visit (your new favorite band, the French album, the Curl-EP…), which led to making Rho the biggest fan of this terrible band, and then to drawing those two pages while I was testing some new art supplies…and SOMEHOW that escalated into making a webcomic that I drew for the next 4 years???
I honestly didn’t have any kind of outline or plan for this comic, I just kept coming up with jokes and funny situations for these guys to be in week after week.
At the time I was already working on another webcomic: Granito, which was a 50-ish page adaptation of someone else’s story that I took as a challenge to learn to make longer comics. Postcards appeared as this incredibly self-indulgent project, where I was just doing whatever the hell I wanted without worrying about if others found it fun or not. Thankfully, people did find it fun! Except maybe for dudebro here:
It’s hard to write about Postcards without feeling nostalgic about the old internet…this was when Tumblr was at its peak and Tapas (then Tapastic) was a relatively new website with a close community. There was no algorithm choosing what to show you, we hadn’t “pivoted to video”, and you could actually see the posts of the people you followed!! Back then I used to be extremely online, fooling around and making memes:
It was certainly a fun time to be online, and I really enjoyed being part of a community of webcomic artists (does anyone remember #webcomicchat?). I also made some really good friends through this comic!! I certainly don’t interact as much as I used to (I’m old and tired of social media, sorry guys…), but I still care a lot about everyone and love running into old friends at conventions or just seeing what they’re up to these days.
In the offline world, Postcards kept me company through my last year of undergrad and my whole stay in graduate school–lots of stress and hard times, but knowing that at the end of the day I could come home and draw these silly little guys was always comforting.
I ended up finishing Postcards in Braille in late 2017, closing the story with my characters moving into a new stage of their lives. I could’ve had it going on for longer, but at that time I was working towards finishing my thesis and figuring out what to do after that, so it just made sense to me.
In 2018 we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign and I got to collect all of Postcards in Braille into a book! I actually ended up sending the final files to the printer pretty much at the same time I was printing my master’s thesis–I still don’t know how I pulled that off, but it all fell into place in a nice way.
After Postcards finished I didn’t just get to print it as a book—I’ve also been able to table at North American conventions like SPX, CXC and TCAF, participate in various panels, and get a deal to make a graphic novel! I think it’s easy to get lost in all the stress and frustration of the things I haven’t done yet, but it’s impressive to look back and see that I’ve actually done a lot of the things I only dreamed of ten years ago. Idk, it kinda puts things into perspective.
Also, you know that these days I collaborate with my boyfriend Rodrigo in most of our comic work, from Walking to Do to our middle-grade book The Do-Over to other shorter comics here and there. Back when I made Postcards I wasn’t dating Rodrigo, but did you know he made a guest comic for it?
Rodrigo also convinced me to break my self-imposed webcomic rule of never going back to redraw my old pages. At some point he pointed out that a panel had some weird proportions, and also suggested a tiny change in dialogue to follow up on the telepathy joke I was making in the page. To which I reacted like a mature artist open to constructive criticism:
By the time I was preparing the book files for the printer he reminded me of this page again, and I gave in and changed it. I’m not sure if anyone noticed the change (except for our patrons, who already heard this story), but I think it worked out a lot better than the original!
It’s been a little over six years since I posted the last page of Postcards in Braille. Re-reading it I find a lot of things I could change, some pages I don’t like as much as I used to, but as a whole it still has a really special place in my heart. I just love these guys! I considered getting back to it a couple times, but I’m so tired of everything else being a reboot of something older that it didn’t feel right to do more of the same. Which doesn’t stop me from doing the occasional doodle here and there?
Anyway, ten years is a big milestone, and it’s been really fun to look back through old files and tweets to write this post…lots of good memories!! Postcards in Braille was entirely a work of love, and I hope to bring this fun and enthusiasm to every other comic that we make. Hopefully you’ll get to enjoy those, too.
