About Fabulous Clem
I
am creating this webcomic to do justice to a number of concepts that have
lived in my head alone for too long. Above all, it's my homage to the fox,
a relatively ordinary animal that occupies an extraordinary position in the
compendium of human myth. I love imagining stories about intelligent, talking
animals, but unlike many others with this interest, I don't focus on a single
species, or just a handful. Having covered a certain type of animal once,
I like to move on. Fabulous Clem will be my attempt to pay foxes the hearty
dues they deserve. :-)
Fabulous Clem will tie together several ideas I've had over the years involving talking foxes. The name Clemens (in my head it was Clemence until I learned that form is usually feminine) came to me in a short fantasy I developed on a nighttime walk at the age of 15 or 16. Clemence de Rivetton was a fox who explored a mountainside with blue slopes, passed through a magical cave, and found himself employed by an old farmer who wanted him to keep an ever-descending star from reaching the Earth. Drama ensued.
In college, I learned of the dominance ritual that female red fox kits employ to determine a hierarchy, and imagined putting a new, playful spin on it. I never wrote the short story that this might have inspired, but I did write a Chelsea script about a fox playing checkers on the Internet, with this old idea in mind. Once I decided to start Fabulous Clem, it seemed natural to make Amber a character.
The thoughtstream which inspired Fabulous Clem directly, though, was one that developed during a period when I was reading myths and fables from various cultures. I thought about how in so many of them the character behave irrationally, in order to drive home a point--this is often why animal characters are cast to begin with. I wondered what would happen if these fables were visited from a more realistic point of view. After all, isn't the conflation of realism with surrealism a big part of humor? Kind of like matter and anti-matter, really....
The other two reasons I started this are fairly pedestrian--I wanted to educate myself in skills like drawing, web design, and story development--and I wanted to have a webcomic, because I enjoy reading them and felt like I could do a decent job. As for the first goal, I already feel that I've learned a great deal about many things from this endeavor. Regarding the second, I guess we'll see.
I created the first page of Fabulous Clem in January of 2004, but I didn't put anything on the internet for several months. The official launch date of Fabulous Clem was Thursday, 28 April 2005.