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About
Rhiannon McCullough is native of Rhode Island where she studied Theatre and German Language at Roger Williams University. She is currently studying for her MFA in Asian Theatre Performance at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa which is why the site may sometimes be a little late. She has been writing and drawing comics for longer than she cares to remember, and her first finished comic Schwarz Kreuz can be viewed here. She enjoys a wide range of films and literature, including but not confined to, a number of Anime series and she resents her work being referred to as "Manga", it is not though more influenced by eastern art than western. Favorite foods include clam chowder and honey cinnamon flavored coffee drinks, (though not in the same meal of course). In her spare time she collects chopsticks and rusting metal and plays a lot of RPGs including the pen and paper kind.
About the Comic
In early 2002 I decided to write a comic that I would actually finish, something I could really commit to and take seriously. Prior to that all me forays into the relm of the graphic novel had been comic, satire mostly, and I had never truely utilized pannel structure. The story that formed was then called Razor a science fiction story that ran away with itself and soon became rather epic. I realized prety soon that I didn't have the artistic tallent to do the story justice, so I decided to commit to a less ambitious project to hone my skills. I lited on Schwarz Kreuz and started writing that in 2003. Schwarz Kreuz has since become much more than a lite side story to polish my drawing and I can not honestly say that it is in anyway inferior to Razor. In fact after three years the incompitent mental ramblings of a college freshman shot through with my tendency towards structurally unsound plot elements was making it clear that Razor needed a serious overhaul, and not just in the art department. I'd been strugling with the narative for almost a year as I'd been thinking about what to write when Schwarz Kreuz finally came to a close it seemed that, though I had a wonderful set of characters and inter character relationships, Razor just wasn't going to work in it's original form.
It was difficult to decide how to change it. Every time I tried to update the story it felt like I was simpley writing something compleately other and that wouldn't do. I might just as well write something else. Eventually I got frusterated and gave it up as a loss. But it wouldn't leave me alone. The story was flawed, but the charcters kept standing acusingly behind me nagging to have their story told. I don't know how I decided on it but I eventually decided to take the story out of space and set it on a sort of post appocoliptic setting (I have no idea how else to describe it, alternate reality maybe who cares really). And for some reason the story regained all the vitality it had lost in pervious alterations. The result is a much simpler, tighter and no less epic story with all the fat trimmed and no fancy distracting bells and whistles left to cause gapping logic holes in the plot. With all the important character relationships and plot points of the original with much less of the schoolyard comic book cheese.
Special Thanks
Mom, Dad, Peter and Andrew McCullough, Fenris, David Streever, Brett Botbyl, Kate and Alex, Erichan, Travis and everyone who's lent me their support on this project.
