Oculama

After navigating through the twists and turns of our Road Trip Tournament 2024, we sit down with the Champion, Furlitz, to talk about their scenic route to victory, the pit stops along the way, and what it truly means to drive home the win in the comic world's most unpredictable road race.

Tell us about yourself! How long have you been doing comics? How'd your comic history lead you to Oculama? 

SO I count myself as making comics for about 4 years. I've always really liked comics, I was into cape stuff when I was younger and technically the first comics I made would have been some little things about stuffed animals when I was like 10, but I started working more consistently at it in 2020. I'd also gotten big into webcomics by then, and I first heard about OCTs as a concept when Kill Six Billion Demons ran its Ring of Power. The first OCT I joined was its sequel, War for Rayuba. in 2021. That was a huge experience for me and since then I've been following around the community that grew out of that across the OCTs they've been involved in, up to and including Oculama!

What was the creative path you took to creating your stories for each round?

Usually I'm more interested in vibes, like the atmosphere and tone of a story more so than in any specific plot beats. I always start with a messy sketch page to get a feel for the character designs and the overall mood.

 

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Working on concept imagery like this helps me pick out one or two scenes or ideas that I think are going to be important to the comic, that I can build around to write the rest of it. I tend to work really iteratively, so going into a round I try to get a plan laid out as quickly as possible with the intention that the plan is going to be a rough draft that I can change as I go. If you look back at the thumbnails for my comics in Roadtrip, most of them are basically different stories than the final comics. I also like to have some sense of continuity between rounds, but I think it's good to stay flexible with stories so I try not to be too precious about an overarching plot or character arc. For me it's more important to have a solid idea about the emotional core of my character. Like, the emotional core for Beach Body in Roadtrip was this idea that the road trip is just more important to her than to anyone else, so she's sad when everyone keeps leaving. Just keeping that in the back of my mind when writing the rounds helped to inform a lot of the story decisions, it's why all the opponent characters leave the bus by choice instead of getting lost or stuck, it felt right for that idea that everyone else has something bigger going on in their lives except BB.

What advice can you provide by way of your behind-the-scenes process? Did you have a gameplan from the beginning?

This is hardly unique advice, but I think one of the most important things is just to plan for the time you've got. A lot about my comics was defined just by the fact that I knew I could reliably get four colored pages done in a week, so I picked stories that I knew I could get done in that space. Like, in my Round 1, the ending with the scarecrow and the missing sign wasn't the original plan. My script and thumbs were about Edward chasing after a mysterious third person who was also on the bus. I scrapped that because the concept of “Edward is chasing this person but not in a way that Beach Body notices” was just slightly too complicated to establish cleanly in four pages. A “missing” poster on the other hand is such a recognizable symbol that the whole story around it can be conveyed with two panels. I'm a real big fan of economical storytelling like that, conveying something visually can be so much faster, and imo usually hits harder, than something that takes a page of dialog. A big part of making that work is just clarity. Like, I ended up redoing the first page of my round 3 comic because of this- I've got the first version next to the final version here, and I still kinda think the first one could have been a cooler image finished, but for the sake of readability it needed that giant Funbo head in the middle, or else it wasn't clear enough what the zombies were supposed to be.

Even using Funboland was sort of an economical choice, I picked it in part because it's already established in Oculama as a Disneyland expy, and evil monster Disneyland is already established as an internet horror trope, so I can just stick Mickey Mouse ears on a spooky silhouette in front of the sign and its fairly safe to assume readers will pretty much get the idea in one or two pages.

 

Were there any story ideas, or concepts that hit the cutting room floor?

Round 3 changed the most by far. I was planning to work more directly off of the story that Wolke set up in their Round 2, so originally the “Battle of Funboland” was the whole comic. Wolke's bus driver character was going to be there and there was more stuff about the Cult of Funboland, who were gonna sacrifice our characters to raise up their god-king Funbo. I got as far as roughing the first page, which would have opened on ambient shots of Funboland while Beach Body gives a narration monologue about the nature of gods, and then halfway through I realized I was just really bored with my own script. Like, I was trying to fit so much stuff in that I couldn't give any of it space to be as fun or cool as it should have been, and there was almost no room for interaction between the three characters. I didn't wanna cut the concept completely though, and I was pretty attached to the last four pages so I just took them and used them as the first four pages in the new comic. At the time I had next to no plan for what I'd replace the cut page space with, so I kinda just filled it up with all the other road trip type junk that I didn't get to fit into the other two rounds, and I think probably it was a good trade off!

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Learn more about Furlitz over at Tumblr and BlueSky Social