A Retrospective of "A Bunch of Wires"

Hello everyone, and I hope you’re having a happy spring! Now that it's finally May, it's officially been a year since I uploaded the comic A Bunch of Wires last year. It's very difficult to evaluate your own works when you’re making them because you have to figure out how a reader with no prior knowledge of the story will react to it. However, now that it's been a while and I have some distance from the project, I reread it with fresh(er) eyes. I have a lot of thoughts about it, to say the least...

Before I get into my thoughts about the plot, I wanted to make a note about the upload format. I think that overall the way I uploaded the images is fine, and I certainly prefer it over some webcomic sites where every single page requires a clickthrough link, but man. The images I uploaded are way too fucking big. Aside from the obvious problem of them taking too long to load, it also created an issue on mobile where all the pages look blurry unless you zoom into them. This is a pretty big problem considering my entire justification for not downsizing the images was to preserve the quality.

While I was making it, I was really proud of the fact that I was creating something that someone would have to go out of their way to understand, and didn't try to hold your hand to be more approachable. Now, I just wish I made something that people could actually follow. The point of the work is that you have to pick up on a lot of "hints" and easter eggs in order to figure out what's going in the story, but I don’t think that it's fair expectation that a reader will both pick up on those things and somehow figure out what it's actually supposed to mean.

For example, there’s a page early on that’s meant to depict an online gossip forum discussing Saint Augustine. One poster makes an insane theory about Gio being replaced by a clone, which all the other users dismiss. My idea was that after reading the ending of the comic, the reader would come back to this page to see if this user actually had a point. There's an image on the page comparing the real Gio to the "egregore replacement Gio", and this image is basically exactly what’s actually going on in the comic. An "egregore" is an occult concept that refers to several people’s thoughts creating a single entity. Given the way that his fans project onto him, Gio is an egregore in every sense of the word. That being said, I did want to leave it up to audience interpretation on whether or not there’s anything actually supernatural going on in the comic, or if everything shown to you is strictly metaphorical and something going on inside of the character's heads.

The reference to Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic is a core part of the comic. For those who don’t know, Rhythm 0 was a performance art piece in which Abramovic stood completely still and gave audience members permission to use 72 objects on the table in whatever way they wanted for six hours. I'm not going to recount the details of what happened to her during those six hours, so I encourage you to look up the extensive documentation about it online. I became inspired to reference it in a comic because I first read about it when I was already thinking a lot about celebrity culture and parasocial relationships, and I was witnessing a lot of disturbing behavior in fandom spaces. Josie already being familiar with Rhythm 0 is important as well. When she recognizes the objects on the table, she immediately figures out that he’s going to try and recreate it himself. However, without already knowing this context, the following scene where she tries to talk him out of doing it is kind of incomprehensible.

There's a page near the end that is basically meant to spell out what's happening in the plot, but even that comes off as a bit too convoluted to follow. That being said, what I really wanted people to pick up on was the reference to Andy Warhol's portraits of Marlyn Monroe. I have always interpreted Warhol's work as being about the ways in which an image being printed over and over again distorts the image in the process, and I feel that this distortion has advanced far past printed images now that all of us carry smartphones in our hands..

Here’s a question that I was thinking about when I made this comic: When people fall in love with someone that they’ve never actually met (and in some cases aren’t even alive anymore), what exactly are they falling in love with? To me, this kind of relationship feels like creating a construction of a person in your head just based on the images we see of them. Wires was basically my attempt to depict what it feels like when this construction of a person appears to take on a life of its own.

Although I wanted to leave it unclear whether or not there's actually anything supernatural going on in the comic, the one thing I wanted to make very clear with the last page is that there is a separation being the "real" Giovanni Vara and the Gio that Cherry made up in her head. I was really hoping that readers would go back to earlier sections of the comic with this in mind and interpret Gio's actions and dialogue differently with this new information. The whole time, it seems like Gio is just being a dick to Cherry for no reason, but he was actually just echoing her own insecurities back at her. It's intentional that the first page of the comic very clearly states that only Gio's friends call him "Gio", yet literally everyone calls him that whether they personally know him or not. Cherry and the other fans don't view him as an real person who they don't know. Instead, he has become something else entirely.

To end this blog post, I would like to give my sincere thanks to everyone who has read the comic and left me a nice message about it! I was hoping by now that I would have something else substantial to post about my next project, but it unfortunately just isn't ready yet. I think that now I'm making progress faster now that I'm getting in the swing of things, so hopefully I can keep my momentum up. As always, thank you for reading!