Today’s guest is the inimitable Ari, aka The Giant Rat! They are an indie comics champion with over one gazillion zines under their proverbial belt, all raw, all powerful, an absolute treat for the eyes and brain. This conversation punched me right in the heart – let’s go!
Good morning! Today, we are in a room absolutely stuffed to the brim with bean bag chairs. Please, find your favorite and make yourself comfortable.
It is so great to be in this lumpy room! I haven’t finished my coffee yet, so I’ll just stand here awkwardly until I do, if that’s ok.
Coffee must take precedence.
So, first of all, for the readers at home: what are we looking at here?
This is a relic from 2007, thought to be lost to the ages, but recently excavated from an old roleplay partner’s external hard drive. Based on the other drawings of anime boyfriends in the cache, there’s a high probability it was born in the margins of my little spiral bound middle school planner. If you squint really, really hard, they’re characters from the DS game The World Ends With You. My guy was the guy on the left, a type of ghost called a Reaper. His name was Tenho and his only function in the game was to block off parts of the map and lose to you at checkers. The guy on the right, who was played by the archaeologist I mentioned before, was named Futoshi, a human concert venue tech with an equally bare-bones starting point. They were boyfriends, obviously.
You mentioned to me that this is one of a series of drawings produced during your time in a DeviantART roleplaying group. Could you tell me a little bit about that? How old were you, how did you get into it?
Teens have this uncanny ability to turn ANYTHING into a roleplay site. On DeviantART, to prevent there from being hundreds of protagonists and no one else, this would usually work by one account being a hub and having a list of characters, and people claiming them and making face accounts to roleplay out of. This meant that you could have your character make art and write little journals, too, and you’d roleplay by commenting on other people’s stuff. I don’t think there was a character limit, but we pretty much exclusively played using just dialog and the occasional action in asterisks, like:
*ari flops into a pile of small bean bags, holding their empty coffee cup above their head just in case*
I was 13 and I had just beaten TWEWY, but since I was a little late to it, the only characters left were scraps. I grabbed Tenho and quickly hit it off with a handful of other side-characters, including Futoshi, a random street vendor, some OC’s, (translator’s note: OC means Original Character) and another ghost. Because of the timing of all this, all the prominent characters from the actual game were already bored and mostly inactive, so we created this tight knit little loser posse. I think even the group itself was technically inactive for most of the time we played there.
*nods thoughtfully*
Your work today is very raw and exploratory, both visually and personally, and I’m really fascinated to see how your younger self was kind of beginning to flex those wings through the lens of a fictional character. How would you say your roleplaying experience fits into your larger artistic journey?
I’ve always been captivated by characters on the sidelines who exist in vivid worlds. I remember being a kid once and sitting in traffic and having the sudden realization that every person, in every car, had lives just as intricate as mine. Just how did these events outside their control effect the plots of their own lives? This is a vibe I try to capture even when writing my own stuff.
Creating fanart, especially for bare-bones characters and under-explored pieces, is like being a contestant on an episode of Chopped. It provides a foundation and gives me some ingredients to work with, and with some inspiration and a little oversharing to the judges, I can create something heartfelt and new. With fandom as a bridge, I can create a sense of familiarity with the casts I cobble together, even if I may be drawing them for the first time.
TWEWYRP-DA was my first real experience with this, I think. Tenho’s weird ghost curse meant he was unable to leave the city, and while Futoshi could, Tenho was all he had. With the narrative drive of the protagonists and the structure of the game’s events gone, the universe of The World Ends With You started to grow this strange, dismal plot. We wrote about being trapped and struggling to make friendships of convenience work in a way only a bunch of middle schoolers could put into words. I don’t think I could have reached out to a bunch of peers online to tell them what I’d been going through, but I COULD sneak onto the family PC and hunt and peck about my ghost boy waiting for his life to start until the sun came up! Doing this helped me process my own feelings, and made me better at putting them into words.
Who was inspiring you at the time? What else were you into?
During this time, I was really into puzzle and visual-novel-adjacent games like Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, and Professor Layton. I think Soul Eater and Avatar were around about this time, too?
I also moderated huge scale mafia games on an Ace Attorney fan forum, like, over 100 players at a time big. All by myself using a word document to organize it all! The games lasted weeks and I made all kinds of crazy secret roles and events in them. I achieved this by using this technique called “being thirteen and having nothing better to do”. My specialty was creating lots of complicated roles and twists that could make the whole game flip on its head if a butterfly flapped its wings. I think I’ve always liked the idea of removing any kind of “main character” from a story.
Ummm? That’s AMAZING.
Right now, it appears that you – sorry to put you on blast, but like, same hat – are enmeshed in a very serious playthrough of Fire Emblem: Three Houses, aka Anime Chess, aka The Game Where Sometimes You Wanna Ride A Wyvern And Also Make People Smooch. This made me wonder: has your approach to fandom changed over the years? Why do you think that is?
I AM… I hate to say this, but Three Houses might be a good game? I just completed an all-wyvern run of Golden Deer and I can’t stop thinking about it. Have you played the Golden Deer route yet? Has anyone? Did I dream it? Like, like, I get it, the Lions get your heartstrings and Edelgard is a lesbian icon, but do they have an underground dubstep wizard fortress!? Spoilers, but: No. They don’t.
To answer your question, in the ways I interact with others, absolutely! I’m not a teen anymore, I’ve outgrown the concept of fandom friends that you talk to about your Thing a lot and part ways with once you lose interest. But in terms of making fanart, I haven’t. I hope I never do, because its a really important part of my creative diet.
There’s this little dance we do once we become adults where we dance around things we like. I mean, we literally just did it! We know each other, and are in a space built to talk about these interests, and you still apologized for asking me about a game we mutually enjoy! And, even though I’ve sunk over a hundred hours into it, I still couldn’t even say it was good without a question mark. Fire Emblem isn’t without its flaws, but my kneejerk reservations weren’t about anything to do with the game. It’s because the act of being jazzed about something that’s unproductive as an artist is blasphemous. It’s cringy and it’s a waste of time, it’s junk food, so we have to feel bad, and we do this little dance. “I know it’s stupid, but, but, but…”
Even as a zine freak kind of indie cartoonist, there’s still pressure on me to make art that’s trademarkable, profitable, “real”. When I mentioned I was a cartoonist to my radiologist last week, they didn’t ask me what I wrote about, but “how that worked”. When art is seen through the same lens as all other work, fanart isn’t “real art”. This sucks, because having to downplay things you’ve made sucks. But! For all the drawbacks the fanart dance might have, there’s a silver lining: it still grants you the same shield.
My second-biggest comic project ever was a years-long Undertale blog called Epic Divorceman where I used the “No One Dies” AU format to write about childhood suicidality, generational abuse, disability, and survivor’s guilt. I used these comics as a way to experiment visually, spent tons of time figuring out how to write even the most cruel characters through a sympathetic lens, and used that practice as a way to unpack my own ugliest traits and fears. I was able to focus on the characters entirely, because it was “Just Fanart”. I didn’t have to do the work to create the setting, and I wasn’t expected to have a completely polished standalone project. I just lobbed feelings spaghetti at the wall and let whatever stick stick. To this day, I still get strangers emailing me about how they’ve never felt more seen. To them, I can be candid and open and soft.
To anyone else, hey!
Hey, hey, I know it’s silly.
It’s just fanart!
Ahh! I feel this so much!! With my Garfield fancomic, it very much felt like I was able to explore some personal feelings that would have felt… somehow… weird to share without having that Jon Arbuckle mask on. Plus, there’s something very freeing about just taking time to yell “I LIKE THIS AND WILL INVEST TIME AND LOVE INTO MAKING SOMETHING ABOUT IT” and then seeing what comes back. It’s possibly the softest form of rebellion, but wonderful all the same.
What else are you into right now?
This whole plague thing is a drag, but it DOES mean that every flippant “We should watch that sometime!” comment is suddenly taken very seriously. I was fortunate enough to mention to the right people that I didn’t know much about Godzilla, so now I’ve been watching a couple of those a week in a seemingly random order. Rubbery puppydog friend to children 60’s Godzilla one day, brooding scary 00’s Godzilla the next. I wolfed down all the Dorohedoro anime and have the OVA album playing as I type today, and I’m slowly reading though the manga now. I’ve also been replaying Phoenix Wright with one of my best friends and chipping at my Black Eagles run, and watching a handpicked selection of the gayest Xena: Warrior Princess episodes, and… No, I actually don’t have anything less tacky to list right now, that’s it. I’m very happy with this assortment.
Any advice for young people figuring out how to express themselves visually?
To pull back the curtain a little, I got these questions a few weeks ago, then had a medical scare that took up all of my processing power for a while. During that period between Then and Now, I spent a lot of time going on walks and calling my friends, many of whom are much cooler than me. Illustrators and writers and cartoonists who make cool stuff and have cool reputations and careers to go with them. Every single one had something similar they did at that age, and most of them -continued- to do silly fanart or roleplay or some other form of “childish” transformative work. None of them ever lost work because someone found their old fanart. In most cases, I had no idea about this part of them, buried just under the surface, sometimes in people I’d known for years! Bringing up this interview was like magic, and we got to connect about these very dear pieces of ourselves we usually hold close.
At its root, yeah, drawing fanart isn’t going to have as much weight behind it as drawing an epic, original masterpiece. I’m not saying it will. But looking back at my own creative history, times where I spent a lot of time drawing fanart were times where I also drew more overall. While I ran Divorceman, I was also doing a weekly experimental webcomic called Trying Really Hard, which led me into making zines and tabling at shows all over the country. Being confident in your own BS and learning to actually finish things is a muscle you need to work, and making art you like making is a good way to do that. Even if it’s silly, even if it’s repetitive, even if it’s “just fanart”. Train yourself that the things you want to make are worth it. They are! And you never know what will impact people.
Anything else you’d like to mention? Upcoming projects, people you’d like to shout out, things I really should have asked but didn’t think to…?
The world being shut down like this means I can’t self-publish or access my usual art equipment, and that paired with a blindness/immune disorder scare has made me freeze up creatively. These questions have honestly really inspired me to just say, muffled in these bean bags:
No, god, no, are you kidding? I’m SO tired, dude, and I thought I was going blind last week! I’ve been occupying my time by making dozens and dozens of paintings of sharks.
But I do have a lot of comics in my backlog and I won’t always be tired. You should follow me for when that happens! Expect a buffer of retina pix and ‘zillaposting first, though. You know what they say! If you can’t handle me at my “speculating which fire emblem knights smoke weed”, you don’t deserve me at my “heartfelt indie comics”…
TRULY. Thank you so much for your time!! I’m just … going to stay in this chair for a second, it really is a little too cozy.
Thank you so much for having me. This interview was a blast to work on and now I don’t think I could crawl out of this pile if I tried… I’m not trying.
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