It won't just be comic strips though. There are some single images I would want to upload, and then I've also decided to upload poetry. Yep, you've heard that right - poetry.
Now, we all know that at some point at school, we were made to dissect poems and analysis them in great detail - usually the really conventional poems written by people like William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth and Robert Browning. What do the metaphors mean? What is the hidden meaning of this poem? And now we know why some people couldn't care less about the subject now.
Luckily, I'm still interested in poetry. It helps that I grew up on poems aimed for kids and then continued to read them even as I started to move onto the "grown-up" stuff. I then took a course in "Poetry & Innovative Form" at university and ended up writing a bunch of poems for my portfolio. Scored a first on it too (73% for the actual portfolio and 68% for its critical reflection). :)
Plus, I've found that poetry's a good way to test my fanfic-writing skills. Like with the poems I wrote with Death Battle! in mind. It was actually one of the things that helped me to move onto the idea of fan comics in the first place.
I planned to post this poem online on the 10th May to coincide with American Mother's Day, due to it being an elegy to do with mothers. As I said though, I want to post it with pictures later on when I post the preview chapters of the fan comic online. So here is the poem as it was originally written without the added images.
Belle-mère
Dead.
Nothing poetic about that.
Lyin' there on the ground,
Sprawled out,
Eyes open.
Not
much of a funeral either.
Not
enough money, y'know.
Just
found a casket,
Slipped her into it.
Buried it underground.
Marked the gravestone.
Scattered petals onto it.
That was it. Rest in peace.
I was the only one at this
“funeral”, if you couldn't tell.
Not very conventional.
But then again, Mama was never
the conventional type herself.
She never took shit from anyone.
More
like
a punk if you
will with her
tough attitude
and Mohawk.
But that was what I loved about
her,
And I guess I've taken after her
too.
I cried for days after Mama died.
Don't you dare laugh.
I'm not exaggeratin'.
It would be full-on snifflin' and
sobbin' in the morning
(which I'd try to stifle with a
beer or two).
And just when it seemed all over,
I'd start again some hours later.
So
there I'd be
curled
up blubberin'
in
one corner.
The
dog shittin'
and
whimperin'
in
the other corner.
Mom? Mom?
C C
o o
m m
e e
b b
a a
c c
k k
! !
*sob*
My
face
would
be
all
blotchy
and
snotty
from
the
tears.
At
least there was the dog to cuddle up to and have them licked away.
They
say grief ain't the type to last forever.
They're
right.
I
tend to get on fine most days.
I
joke around with the others.
I
do the stuff I like to do.
It
doesn't take much to make me laugh.
now
and some trigger gets pulled.
every then,
But
'Cause
I guess Mama was the one person that really understood me.
...
Pass me another beer, won't you?
Yes, before you ask, this is indeed Death Battle! fanfiction that veers into dark fic territory. You've probably seen My Little Pony dark fic, maybe some RWBY dark fic, and now here is some Death Battle! dark fic, all in poetry form.
I have no shame over it though. It's one of my favourite poems from the portfolio and besides, I've written some more comical Death Battle! fan poems as well. It's just that those are still being worked on and they aren't part of the university portfolio.
There are two aspects of this poem I would like to discuss - the topic itself and the form of it. You don't have to pay attention to this if you just want to read the poem only, but I felt like analysing my own poetry just to give an idea as to why I wrote it in the first place.
The topic.
The most important question you'll probably be asking is this: Why the hell did I write a poem about the normally comical Boomstick mourning the death of his mother? It never popped up in the original series, right?
Well, it did in a sense. He has brought up about how he misses his mother in certain videos, and he did cry over her death for a bit in "Naruto vs. Ichigo" (I've posted the Rooster Teeth website version as you may need to login to the YouTube version - goddamn rating system). Sure, she apparently died due to some ghost in the barn, but the impression still remains.
And then, oh dear god, there's the ending of the "Top 10 Moms With Boomstick" episode (again, I've uploaded the Rooster Teeth website version in case the YouTube version gets taken off sometime in the future). To explain my thoughts on the scene, I did not expect him to cry that much over Bell-mère's death in One Piece. The comparison he made between her and his own mother just before he had to explain her goddamn execution didn't help either. Boomstick may be comic relief most of the time, but when he cries like that, it's utterly painful.
That's partly the reason why I chose to name the poem "Belle-mère" in the first place. The episode was still lingering on my mind when I started the poetry module. The other reason is because the word is French for "stepmother" and/or "good mother", the latter term being how Boomstick saw his own mother. I wanted to explore some of the grief that he felt over her demise in a bit more detail, given that we've gotten some insight into said grief but now in full detail just yet.
The form.
The poem uses the visual form, with many of the verses in different shapes. In order of appearance: one is in the shape of a grave, one is in the shape of a mohawk, one is in the shape of a crying face and one is is in the shape of a gun. I placed two other verses on the opposite sides to each other to represent corners and another verse has the words strewn everywhere to represent a blotchy face (though you can't see the face there).
The guy who taught the Innovative Poetry module was brilliant. Not only is he already a published poet, but he was super-encouraging when it came to looking through my drafts. He doesn't hate conventional poetry as much as he claims to, but he pretty much told us to skip the poetic language associated with traditional poetry (e.g. similes, metaphors and rhyming) and just focus more on the form.
The module was helpful to me in many ways. Beforehand, I tended to get writer's block when it came to poetry and tried to focus too hard on using poetic language. Once I found out that I only had to focus on the form, it gave me more room to experiment and write about the stuff that I was interested in. My own hobbies, food I look, retellings of stories and poems, poetry itself...and of course Death Battle! characters.
There were different forms we learnt - collage poetry, visual/concrete poetry, ekphrastic poetry, lyric poetry, sound poetry...there was quite a lot. Plus we learnt about poets such as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, as well as some who I'd never heard of beforehand.
I originally planned this elegy at the start of the course, and it was my lecturer who suggested using more visual aspects in the poem. He was right. It honestly looks a lot better in this format.
So overall, I'm pretty happy with how this poem turned out. Some people may agree and some people may disagree. But hey, that's how poetry works, isn't it? Some people love William Wordsworth's "Daffodils" for instance and some people hate it. The same goes for fanfic too. It all depends on the type of poetry you like as well as how you interpret the characters being used in fanfiction.
I hope to get the fan comic sorted out soon, so that I can show you what the poem looks like illustrated, as well as the mini-stories I have planned out. I've already written out the manuscripts for plenty of them, but now they need actual pictures. As I said, it's not going to be all doom and gloom - only some of the stories will go into depressing territory. The majority of them will be comedic.
Also, maybe I can upload some of the poems that aren't fanfiction up here in the future. Possibly even start a new thread to focus on them. Again, they won't follow the traditional format either.
