Treading Ground
patreon
Blink of an Aya | Unused Strips
🕑 Added 2025-10-21 04:00:02 +0000 UTCSo, just to recap, Blink of an Aya is a new combination of two comics that I started running after TG back in 2011/2012. The first was The Idle State, which is where the whole school newspaper idea came from. I really thought it was going to be easy to do a simple gag-a-day after doing TG, but it didn't work out that way.
Really, I think it was primarily a reason to introduce Bex.
Bex and The Idle State
Here's some early art of her -
Originally, this comic was going to be called Unread All Over (which is still a pretty fun title) and was straight-up political gag-a-day. I started developing it back in 2010, way before I was done with the first version of Treading Ground.
Remember Tea Partiers? Ah, good times. Seems like stuff was so trivial back then.
If I'd stuck with this formula, it might have actually worked, but I don't think I'd have been happy. I'm a storyteller, so I had the bright idea of doing some story to get this whole thing started, and that's where things went cattywampus.
I renamed the comic The Idle State, and it lasted for 31 comics before I realized I couldn't do the gag-a-day rug pull. There are a few of strips I've cut out for this repackaging, and I think you can see why.
Disposable Sister
The first two cut comics essentially got rid of Aya's sister Kari, which was a mistake, because there was a lot more potential in that character.
Why did I do that? I don't know. Live and learn.
When I redid the comic yet again, I made sure to keep Kari around, and I think we had some fun with her, as you've probably seen.
We may see Kari appear in TG, but if we do, she'll look a lot different.
Aya vs. Politics
I tried to tone down the political and local Atlanta bullshit for this packaging, so that meant this one had to go:
(Also Alex was living with Aya at the time, which I thought was necessary for some reason).
There was also more with the panhandler. But it was an attempt to steel-man Russell's bullshit arguments, and was not a good look for any of these characters.
Like, OK, what does it accomplish to say this? Yes, some panhandlers are con artists. We grow a thick skin and just stop giving money, either because we've been conned or because we can't afford to help. We excuse ourselves from dealing with the problem because we know anecdotally that a few people are out there are just making shit up. But that's a small percentage of the people who are homeless or have otherwise been let down by capitalism. Focusing on the swindlers makes us feel better but doesn't actually help anyone.
I don't know, maybe I was going to go somewhere with all this, but starting and abandoning that thread just to reinforce how naive Aya is was a mistake.
An attempted restart
All of the rest of the TIS strips managed to find a home in Blink of an Aya, though a few were heavily edited (and I painstakingly drew Aya's ponytail on each one of them).
There was one time when I briefly flirted with bringing back the newspaper storyline, and I had an idea for where everybody had disappeared to.
Skyrim was pretty big at the time, and though it became less relevant over the years, it's kind of funny to imagine Denise getting sucked into it for like a decade.
That's All!
Repackaging these comics for sharing here has been a pretty fun project (though it may have required more work than I thought it would!) After many years and hundreds of pages of other projects written, I can now accept this as a fun side-project that taught me a lot, rather than the destruction of my life as a cartoonist.
I hope you enjoyed the ride, and as I've said before, keep an eye out for some familiar faces in the main comic in the future.
Next week we start a brand new story. And more Aya! (I'm not obsessed, you're obsessed.)
