Kūkyo no Onna (Pages 1-6)

I have lots of SU fancomics on Tapas that I'm on hiatus from at the moment mostly because the environment of Tapas agitates me... but I also have a single comic that isn't SU that I want to keep going on with because even though fancomics are my bread and butter, I do think it's good to have one "original" thing.

Way back in high school in the aughts, there was a J-horror craze that sort of took off after the remake of The Ring. I made a point of watching every Japanese (and Chinese, and Korean) horror movie I could get my hands on at the local video store. You know, back when renting physical movies was a thing. I guess you could say I was exposed to that stuff during some formative years. Even though I'm WAY too old to be "edgy" anymore, that style of horror has had an influence on me even when I moved onto other content. I still have a soft spot for those hokey 2000's movies and I do really love the works of Junji Ito and Shūzō Oshimi. I think some of that stuff still creeps into my SU work from time to time, even though SU and J-horror don't really gel together at all, as I've learned with my SU fancomic Kowai Beach City.

My first original webcomic (which might embarrassingly still be on Smackjeeves but I'm not sure) was called Lost Pieces, where I wanted to try and write about twin siblings who were half-human and half-onryō but it was a huge story with a really big cast because I really wanted to emulate Sophie Campbell's "Wet Moon" at the time. But scenes and dialogue meandered and I got bored with it. I tried to resurrect it again as "These Strange Days" on Tapas but again I ran into the issue of starting too big, trying to introduce too many characters too quickly.

Rather than try a third go at this big and complicated story, I decided to try something else. "Kūkyo no Onna" is something brand new, spontaneously thought up by me just musing about what kind of shenanigans an onryō and a yūrei could get up to.

Doing fancomics has taught me to start smaller and go bigger as the story progresses rather than try and start huge. Doing SU comics also made me appreciate "non-human" humanoid characters and how much more flexible and outrageous they can be compared to human characters who are constrained to human lives and expectations. I don't really expect much from this comic in terms of popularity, but I do appreciate being able to try and flex my crosshatching/shading skills and it's always a fun challenge to try and do something where you don't have pre-existing characters to fall back on to fill in gaps you might overlook in writing.

TL;DR: This is something I really care about and I hope I can get it off the ground.