Wrong Issue Two

Dan Hughes talks about Dan Hughes

(I somehow neglected to publish this post, wrote it a couple weeks back. Have it now you cretins.)

I’m going to talk about my own comic, like a navel gazing cretin and you can stop me. Sure, you can stop reading here if you want but we both know you’ve got nothing better to do than read the Junked substack.

I think most creators have a sense of how the creative projects should go. I found working on comics I have a loose timeline in my head of when I want pencils done then inking and editing and so forth. There’s generally a time period you can point to and say “I was working on this at that point.” Wrong 2 didn’t fit that mould. I honestly can’t remember starting work on this comic. 2024 was a busy year for me and I was so deep in the flow of drawing every night that I have no concrete memory of what I was working on when. It’s pretty hard to form a unique memory when it’s all just variations of sitting at the kitchen table, listening to podcasts and drawing. At some point a bunch of stories and ideas came to me that I thumbnailed in a sketch book and at some other points I must have glued it all together. Don’t get me wrong (heh) it’s a cohesive book, but it wasn’t exactly forced into existence on a production timetable like my other books.

The Wrong comics are anthologies of short standalone pieces with no clear theme of throughline between them. Generally I draw one story at a time without rushing or forcing it in any which way. At some point in 2024 I read “Feeding The Monster” by Anna Bogutskaya. A book about what horror means to us and why we can’t leave it alone. I’ve already wrote about this book in Squareface Diaries Issue 3 (my true naval gazing daily journal comic)

If you’re writing horror or weird tales I can’t stress enough how much you should read “Feeding The Monster.” It gives the roadmap how to do a deep dive into your own neurotic fears. I’m not saying before reading this book I was a totally ignorant of how horror works. I knew there was more than just “things are scary because they’re scary” but maybe I never really knew how to explore the concepts right. There are parts to Bogutskaya’s book that I knew I knew but couldn’t express as well as her, and there are other parts that are just clearly obvious now she points it out but I was totally ignorant of before. When I was getting ready to work on Wrong Issue 2 I knew I wanted to draw something that really gives me the creeps in the way “Feeding the monster” describes, then one night the Scared All The Time podcast did an episode on Phrogging. I hadn’t heard the term “Phrogging” before. The host opened the episode with “Well today we’re talking about Phrogging, phrogging is when…” and described what it is. I had to switch the podcast off and write the story Phrogger before doing anything else.

Writing and drawing Phrogger didn’t exactly lift my irrational fear. It probably didn’t make me any more neurotic than usual. Sure as hell wasn’t therapeutic and after drawing it I was uneasy whether I’d release it or burn it. I think when we’re operating in these pretty amateur DIY circles it’s easy to hide behind well used tropes or surreal works. There’s something nerve wracking in writing a story about what genuinely creeps you out then releasing it into the world without an editor or proof reader saying “yeah, you should definitely share these thoughts.” I guess that’s the double edge sword of the underground comics scene.

If Wrong 2 has a theme it’s repression and a misguided search for the paranormal. I’m a true believer in whatever you repress now will come out in weird and horrid ways later on. Carl Jung says that countries that repress religion always wind up with cult like politicians, look at Nazi’s and North Korea. People who repress healthy desires will wind up incurable creeps. It’s inevitable. I’d hate to know what repressed thoughts years ago left me spending hours alone drawing these comics. Paranormal stuff though. Some people are just wishing their life’s were more interesting, but how many people are using ghosts to explain away something much worse? Your neighbours ARE spying on you. You ARE psychotic. There’s a gas leak. Your house is infested with RATS. At some point you ate human brains without knowing and now you have PRIONS.

This isn’t the first time I’ve drawn a bunch of friends messing about with a magic circle and it sure as hell wont be the last. I may be a simple man but I sure love the idea of accidentally summoning some evil you can’t control into your life. I started Wrong 2 with no clear plan and it would up being 32 pages of repressed violence. I’m not thinking about that too much though. I might get one of the other dudes from Junked to review Wrong 2 someday. Writing about this comic has been harder than actually just writing this comic.

Go buy it at www.goatshead.bigcartel.com

Hughes