Suburbia, California
The real world sights and sounds of Sansha & Blanco
Ahoy Mythopoeians!
The last 72 hours have been rather surreal. The infamous Santa Ana winds have caused chaos and destruction all across the southland, with the Eaton Canyon fire raging just a couple of miles from my home of Arcadia, California.
Arcadia happens to be where Sansha & Blanco takes place. It’s a small suburban city that’s part of the greater Los Angeles County sprawl, home to about 89,000 residents. The town began life as ranching land, with its most famous landmark the Santa Anita Racetrack, home of Seabiscuit and world class horse racing.
Arcadia in many ways is typical of Southern California. It lies in the flat San Gabriel Valley, and is home to a large mall, movie theater, supermarkets, and an almost endless stream of home developments.
I grew up on the south side of town, adjacent to a Drive In Movie Theater that my family often frequented. One of my most distinct memories as a child is watching Top Gun out of my parents’ van with my cousins, enjoying the adrenaline pumping dogfights while munching on popcorn as a five year old.
The Drive In Movie Theater shut down around second grade (which, I think was ‘96), and soon after became an empty lot followed by a gated community where one of my best friends KC lived in high school. In his garage, we would spent countless hours painting miniatures, building terrain, and playing Warhammer 40k. It was always strange to me that he lived in what was a former movie theater, and I never missed an opportunity to tell him.
The part of town we lived in was technically governed by Los Angeles County and not the city of Arcadia itself. Arcadia these days is known as the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” with its high household income, good school district, and sprawling houses. The south side, where I was from, had a lot more… character. Next to my house growing up were three separate mobile homes parks - large lots filled with dozens of the pastel colored rectangle trailers that could, in a pinch, be put on wheels and rolled out.
My parents would go to the community center of the biggest mobile home across the street from us to vote, and I would go with them. Our second dog, Fatty, often ran away from home to the trailer park, where we suspected he was from originally (there was a family of Pomeranians there, maybe a puppy mill of some sort, and Fatty was definitely some sort of Pomeranian mix).
When writing Sansha & Blanco, I took a lot of the memories I had growing up and wove them into the comic. Through the story, I try to convey my observations as a child of suburbia, and as someone who is a ‘townie,’ observing the constant and inevitable cycle of change that any place experiences through time.
Sansha has a hard time dealing with change, while Blanco is a lot more open to it. Blanco is an optimist, while Sansha is oftentimes nostalgic for the past, just like I often find myself feeling. Throughout the course of the story, we see the places around Sansha & Blanco change, and though it’s not exactly clear to the dogs what’s happening, they understand intuitively that their lives are changing.
One of my goals with this story is to express something that I can’t necessarily boil down to a sentence or few words. It’s more of a feeling, a yearning, a happy kind of sadness that I often feel yet struggle to convey. I hope it comes across in the story, and I hope you like it!
Ray
As of writing, Los Angeles is still burning. If you have the means, please consider donating to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation or any other suitable charity that supports the city as we mourn, sweep, and begin rebuild.