If you could receive a neural implant allowing you to access virtual reality without awkward goggles, headphones, and controllers, would you accept it? What if it could give you an experience that felt as real as the life you’re living right now? Would you be content to plug in and drift away?
Drugs and Wires is a cyberpunk webcomic where this is a retrofuturistic reality. It picks up where the standalone Dreamspace left off, after main character Dan suffered brain damage from malicious software on a mindtrip and is left unable to access the virtual reality known as Dreamspace. The series follows Dan through the shitty courier job he picks up to pay the bills, his visits to Lin the illegal cybernetics bodymodder, and his struggle to reconnect to Dreamspace in spite of the virus still affecting his brain and implant. I recently got in touch with Cryoclaire and Io Black, the minds behind this spectacular story, for a little insight into their creative process and how they’ve built this world.
Prox: How long have you been working together? Is this your first project together?
Cryo: I think we’ve known each other for almost 3 years at this point. I think Io found me on tumblr through my fanart of Jeff Noon’s Vurt – after that we started talking and realised we had a very complimentary set of skills, and both of us were struggling on work on our projects on our own. I guess our very first project would be part 3 of Dreamspace where Io was kind enough to help me out with the editing – I’ve always been conscious of my language so not worrying about it was a huge relief. Then it turned out that Io was great at pretty much all things writing in general, and things just sort of escalated.
Prox: What attracts you to the cyberpunk genre/aesthetic?
Io: You know, at the risk of completely blowing away my (very limited) credibility in print, I’m actually pretty ambivalent on cyberpunk. Granted, there’s a lot of cool stuff in that field – and Blade Runner will always be in my personal Top 10 as far as genre flicks go – but my go-tos tend to be the ’60s, ’70s writers like Brian Aldiss or John Brunner, not Gibson and company. Even within the genre, I drift towards the atypical stuff – Jeff Noon’s fractured fairytale-Manchester, or the Middle Eastern milieu of George Alec Effinger. To me, the appeal in writing D&W is anchored less in the cyberpunk elements – mangled as they are – than in the nostalgia factor and getting to play with ’90s tech, pop culture, and the aesthetics that accompany them.
Cryo: I’ve always liked sci-fi, but cyberpunk became my obsession after I saw The Matrix as an impressionable kid. I remember going onto The Matrix fan forums and finding out about William Gibson and all that. It just had this grittiness and cool that a lot of Golden Age sci-fi didn’t. And, of course, I loved the aesthetic – extreme fashion, obsession with Japan, hacking, trippy CG in any film that tried to do virtual reality – i don’t know, it was just a perfect mix of things I was into. These days I don’t really read much cyberpunk and try to branch out a little when I do get to sit down with a book, but it’ll always have a special place in my heart.
Prox: Who’s your favorite character to write/draw and why?
Io: I think we’re both fond of Vlad for much the same reasons – he’s such an aggressively over-dramatic, self-aggrandizing piece of work that anything involving him is like bathing in raw, uncut ego. Lin, though, is up there too; she’s such an essential counterbalance to our protagonist’s caustic navel-gazing, and it’s always fun to find new ways of framing and expressing her particular brand of chipper sociopathy.
Cryo: Agreed, Vlad is a lot of fun to draw, as well as any over the top villainous character. Our protagonist is pretty plain and poker-faced most of the time, so dramatic, animated characters are always a nice change.
Prox: What inspired the original 3-part Dreamspace comic? What made you want to build on this world and story in Drugs and Wires?
Cryo: The first part of the comic was just an experiment, really. I wanted to create this first person perspective of trying to connect to virtual reality and tell a story using nothing but screens and interfaces. When it was close to being done, I decided to put in some extra drawings and make it into a story of this character I was constantly drawing at a time. It was surprisingly well received for something I put together in a couple of weeks after work. With part 2 and 3 I added music (courtesy of Neon Shudder) and focused more on the narrative elements. For some reason Dreamspace always felt like a “prequel” to me, even though I struggled to put together a coherent story the prequel is actually for. At some point Io offered to bounce some ideas around and brainstorm where the story could go, and couple of years later, we’re still at it!
Prox: Why Russia 1995 as a setting?
Io: You always need a hook, or risk getting lost in the shuffle. Cyberpunk has become a genre with a very particular tone and visual vocabulary, and there’s no shortage of films, novels, or comics that have trafficked in that look-feel over the past 30-some years. If D&W was set in, say, near-future Seattle, it’d probably read first and foremost as a bad Gibson pastiche.
But that ’90s post-Soviet angle also has a bit of a personal edge to it; Stradania, for better or worse, pulls a lot from both of our childhoods, and the kind of things and people we encountered growing up.
Prox: How do you build your weekly updates? Does the artwork come first, or the dialogue?
Io: Generally, it’s script first. We don’t write strictly chronologically, but to capture particular ideas or inspirations as they occur – for instance, just the other week I hammered out four pages for the ending of the comic, full stop, which takes us a few years down the road. That means in most instances, scenes will have been gestating for several months before Claire starts the process of turning them into a proper comic page.
Way back in 2014, Andy Bobrow published a piece on Medium about how Community creator Dan Harmon “fixed” his comedy writing; Harmon’s advice was to write a script, review it, ruthlessly toss the 98% of it was that was garbage, and start again, repeating the process until the crap-to-gold ratio had reached a tolerable level. We’re not quite that extreme, but I try to keep that maxim in the back of my mind, hunting for ways to make things funnier, punchier, more interesting. It’s fairly typical that a given page to shift dramatically in tone or dialogue between the first and final passes; even once the art is done, I’m always keeping an eye out for “dead air” in the layout where a comment or punchline might be appropriate.
Cryo: Every now and again I rebel and storyboard a scene before we have a dialogue made up. In fact, I’m currently trying to outline some side comic I’m doing using this method, though it’s definitely less effective for dialogue-heavy scenes. As for “tossing out garbage”, Io does it a lot much to my despair. For some reason I tend to get stupidly attached to certain parts of the script, even though I’m not even the one writing it!
Prox: What would be your ideal Dreamspace trip?
Io: I hear good things about Tundra Truck.
Cryo: Hey now, that information is for me and my mindtripper of choice only :p
(Personally, I’d give my left arm to have a VR device that stores neatly in the side of my skull instead of strapping a bulky Samsung Gear to my face. And, hell, if I just had to have two arms after that, I’m sure Lin could cut me a deal. -Prox)
Cryoclaire’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryoclaire242
Io Black’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/b_iologic
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