Several months ago, I designed a character - a sweet, awkward, middle-school age Medusa who is just trying to identify a place to sit at lunch. Naturally, no one wants to sit with her, which of course reminded me of the iconic lunchroom scenes from Mean Girls and Gretchen’s line “You can’t sit with us!”
Suddenly I was in a four week rabbit hole of greek mythology research focussing on female monsters (there are many) which resulted in the Book of Monsters- a collection of cute little girl monsters set in a gossipy middle schooler’s notebook. A Monster Burn Book if you will.
I had started this whole journey in order to create a zine anthology submission, by the time I got to this “monster burn book” I was far from the original prompt with no hope of going back.
And I didn’t really want to start over, I really loved the characters I had created. But I had no idea what to do with them.
I briefly thought about making each Girl Monster an NFT. I talked to a few enthusiastic NFT collecting friends who were very supportive of the idea, but getting into NFT production - and I mean really getting into it and producing work I was proud of because there is a lot of stuff out there that I personally think is just not great - seemed complicated, time intensive, and raised a lot of questions about intellectual property (IP) that I was uncomfortable with. [In the first draft of this post there was a longer tangent here about IP that I would love to talk to you about if you are interested].
Talking to fellow artists and illustrators who work predominantly in print media doesn’t help my NFT confusion. There seems to be a general distrust of NFTs. I think this dislike stems from either: a wariness to embrace yet another new way of “engaging your audience” that you “have to do”; or a feeling that NFTs will cheapen or dilute the “brand” of high quality art that they have worked to build or will not engage the audience that they do have; or just a general feeling of barrier to entry that often comes with any new technologies. Personally, the second I made an OpenSea account I could hear Gretchen’s words echoing in my head - “You cant sit with us!”.
I hope to one day come back to these Girl Monsters - I think there is a story here regardless of the platform or medium in which they are published - but for now my Girl Monsters are just waiting.