GFL – The End Question Mark?
In late 2019, Blind Ferret management acknowledged an issue: The blog. Every iteration of Looking For Group’s website prominently featured space for the latest news, reminders of upcoming con appearances, and a soap box for the creators. As the years went on, that space saw less use. We needed to use the blog better.
Sohmer tasked me with creating regular content for the blog to engage and entertain LFG’s fans. He granted me complete creative control over what that content could be.
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I can get pretty weird.”
He was sure. And Grouping For Looks was born.
For more than 300 days now, GFL loving lampooned the original 32 page volume of Looking For Group. At no point did I doubt what audience these scripts targeted: Me. I indulged in LFG deep cuts and in jokes, made pop culture references I grew up on, and broke the fourth wall in scene descriptions in a way a comic script never would. All for my own amusement.
OK, it wasn’t that selfish. GFL’s target audience was me as a template, not as an individual. If I represent the prototypical longtime LFG fan, what do I want? Definitely the pace, plotting and character exploration of the early issues. Character exploration quickly stood out as the most challenging, since I was using established characters. Even with their alignments swapped, keeping the characters recognizable as the mirror opposites of their traditional presentation tethered me. But the limitation proved to be a fun challenge.
I hope you enjoyed reading the first volume of Grouping For Looks as much as I enjoyed writing it. Don’t let the question mark scare you, this is not The End. However, believe it or not, plotting the course took a fair amount of planning. Whenever I took the plot in a different direction, I needed to reread the upcoming pages to make sure the next steps in GFL’s story paralleled LFG’s. There’s a big shift between LFG page 32 and 33, as LFG volume 2 takes our now united heroes in a different direction.
My goal is to release GFL 33 next week, only taking this week to throw a little behind the scenes while I reread LFG volume 2 and map out possible directions to find the most fun one.
In the meantime, feel free to throw any feedback you have my way. We are all GFL’s target audience, and I’m more than willing to adjust my aim to better hit my mark.