I'm very curious: what were the inspirations behind your "Wait, Find, Accept" characters and world? They're super unique and they sound very interesting!
I really appreciate your question! It's a bit tricky to answer, so thank you in advance for bearing with me while I try to word this answer, because it's going to be very long and tangled! If the analogy helps, I sometimes think of Catband as my personal Crisis on Infinite Earths. In short, it's one big story that I merged most of the characters I've ever had since childhood into. The concept for the comic (band competition) dates to 2004 with Roadie and Silver and other musical types, but Amber, Jill & co's storyline pre-dates it (2002-2003). Catband is the merger of both those ideas into one comic, plus other storylines I care about, and with many older characters reappearing in new roles.
Did the other storylines even exist by then?
In 2002-2004, no, there were no subplots. I came up with the main plot for the comic in 2005-2006, and the other storylines. I was a big fan of LOST (and webcomics like Scary-Go-Round and Questionable Content) at the time, so I was really into the idea of multiple POV storylines, and especially ones that seem to be completely unrelated but later tie in to tell a larger story. The storylines have changed over time though, and while some were in the 2007 comic (like the terrorists), some are newer additions (Wild Dogs, The Great Mistake-- Silver had a completely different role in the old comic; and the freaks-- Mephisto and Crane were important characters, but the others weren't in the comic yet). I've also taken a couple of storylines out entirely. It's the same overall story, though.
How developed was Hedgemaze Expo and Persephone's Winter?
The bands didn't exist in their full forms until 2006 (when I was planning for the actual comic). Izzy, Haggis, and Scurvy are comparably new characters (merely 12 years old, lol). They've all become much more developed over time. Originally Persephone's Winter were antagonists and pretty flat, but I challenged myself to get into their heads and make them sympathetic, too, and how they are now fits how I see the story much better. It's not a story of one band's rise to stardom (which has been done many times); it's a story about a lot of people following their dreams, the lengths they'll go to in the pursuit, and why: what's important to them. (None of what I just said spoils the outcome of the contest, btw.) I want people to be able to root for either band, or any of the others, and care about what happens to them. And hey-- I love them all, too.
Back to Hedgemaze Expo: Jill and Amber's dynamic is what the comic is founded on. Mitzy and Bane I love dearly, but I think I've only started really figuring out those two's dynamic within the group fairly recently. But they're all a fun bunch.
What were the ideas you got that added to the world and brought in new characters?
So Catband is about a band competition, but it's not really "about" a band competition, is it? (No.) There are themes that I care about that were important for me to explore: the changing city, the power of the people, the way we're all more alike than we're different, how we're all in this together (and so on), real life groups of people I wanted to give tribute to (like the freaks, who are based on the real Coney Island Circus Sideshow), issues from my hometown that I wanted to talk about (gentrification, eminent domain, civil liberties, homeland security, cronyism, exploitation, etc.), and real life places and storylines I wanted to share with a larger audience (like the DIY music scene that the Great Mistake are part of, or 5Pointz, the graffiti mecca/artist studio that Paper Street Studios is based on). I feel like I'm making this sound more disorganized than it is, but I promise it all ties together. Catband is a story about a summer in the life of the city probably as much as it is a story about that point of time for any character, and 2007 turned out to work out great as a setting just because of the crossroads the city was at around that time, historically. So my city and the people, places, and things happening in it always inspire me to know what needs to be there.
As for characters specifically: I look at the plot and see where I need people to fill certain roles, and when I can, I dust off old characters for the job and give them a new coat of paint. If I have no one who fits, then I make new characters.
I have a lot of old characters to draw from; I really love them all, and I always keep them in mind until I might have a use for them again, though they sometimes change so much physically that their redesigns might be unrecognizable to anyone but me. Some of the characters have always always been grouped together, but others were from completely separate settings and now are put together. They weren't even all originally human: when I say this is a redesign, I really do mean that. I think the comparatively least convoluted way I can try to describe how the story got to where it is now is in a timeline:
- Everyone created before 2004 was from miscellaneous different stories and settings that are mostly irrelevant to Catband now, except for personalities and relationships and whatever other lore is still useful to refer to (there's at least one rivalry in the comic that dates to what those characters did when I was probably four years old). None of these originally had anything to do with a band competition.
- The exception is Life in Paradise, which was a prose story I wrote in 2002-2003. Amber was the main character of that, and it was also about Jill, Jesse, Dave, Craig, Gabriel, Sharon, Hali, Lupe, Ira, and Theo. This is what I generally consider to be the earliest version of Catband: even though it wasn't about a band competition, Amber was a musician who had stopped playing and Jill wanted to get her friend to play again. That basic plot has never changed, and that's the core of the comic.
- Jill was originally (in 2003) my player character in the short-lived MMO The Sims Online. Yeah. She's the only good thing to come out of that game. I really can't remember when she became a rock star (whether it was before or after The Sims: Superstar came out in 2003), but she did, and so she's always been this ambitious spitfire determined to get her band to the top. In 2004 in speech class we had to write a fake introduction for a person, and so I wrote one for Jill, the famous frontwoman of her band, Hedgemaze Expo, who was helping raise money for an animal charity.
- Let me roll that back a moment: Hedgemaze Expo was originally the name of the fake band my best friend and I had in high school. We just wrote silly songs under that name and acted like it was an actual band. My favorite was an ode to Q-tips. That speech class promo was when I first lent the name to Jill's band, and it's been theirs since.
- Mitzy is a character from when I was very little; Bane is from 2003. Neither had anything to do with music until I later wedged them into the comic and band.
- I created Roadie in 2004 and paired him up with Silver as best friends; this was when I had the idea for the comic, and the Catband name. That just started from me doodling bands in my lunch periods and imagining a parody of American Idol. I thought about what Roadie and Silver would do in this world, and who would be in Roadie's band, and it all unfolded from that. Most (but not all) characters created in 2004 or later were made for Catband and never existed anywhere else.
- I created the rest of Roadie's band in 2006 (Izzy, Haggis, Scurvy). Xero was reused from a character I'd had since I was a baby.
- I started drawing the first version of the comic in 2006, and started posting it online on January 1, 2007. Let's just say it was very different from what you've seen of the characters now.
- It was somewhere between urban fantasy, parody/allegory/social commentary, comedy, drama, and... a lot of other things. It was pretty silly. I'm still fond of it but it was all over the place. There was a robot war (over creamy vs. crunchy peanut butter). There was police brutality. The main character was so plot irrelevant that I've since written her out of the comic completely.
- I kept it up until 2009. I stopped partly because of my health (pages were taking me months toward the end) and partly because I'd written and drawn myself into directions I no longer agreed with. I learned a lot from it, though!
- I've generally been working on a reboot since, not constantly over the years, but off and on. I made other comics in the meantime, and I had close friends make fun of it in a way that made me ashamed of it and want to distance myself from it for a few years. It probably wasn't until 2017 (maybe when I joined TH) that I started thinking of it again as something I should seriously attempt, that people might actually be interested in reading. I'm still working on making myself believe that.
Also, and this is kinda a silly question, but have you written actual music for these bands? Do you plan to (or to write more)?
It's not a silly question! I mentioned the joke songs from high school, but other than that, no, I haven't. I'm not particularly musical IRL (I did write a lot of songs and sing a lot as a kid, but idk, at some point that stopped); I'll probably at least write some lyrics for the comic, though.
Thanks again for the questions and for indulging this ramble. :')