Nature of Nature's Art is a series of graphic novels about basic animals that are trying to create a healthy society. (See the about page for more information.) The genre may be considered light fantasy or science fiction. Select the story you'd like to read using the drop-down menu at the top of the browser window. If you'd like, you may click the "in medias res" checkbox beneath the menu in order to jump right into the middle.

Animals have long been our cohabitants on this planet, but they have no structure in their lives apart from instinct. Homo sapiens sapiens has dominated the landscape thanks to its unsurpassed primacy in communication skills. But what forces fueled this engine?

It is the power of Art which the animals turn to in solving this problem. Ambitiously adopting the title of "man," they are determined to control Art and create a prosperous society for themselves. But Art is not easily understood, its powers dangerous and meaning fleeting. For to understand Art, the animals must peer into the depths of their own nature, and excise the animal itself, becoming human. Just how incredible is this feat?

CURRENT STORY: Syconium

One fine day in the year 2191, a young artist in training, VFRHXXX, observes a captive act between two wolves underneath a fig tree. This introduces her to the power of sex, and its influences beyond rational thought. The power of possession and basal instinct captures her imagination. She desires this power for her own art, which explores the invisible, abstract world underpinning society. However, a phase of artistic experimentation in which sex becomes a chthonic element of her paintings ends in near-total failure. Now what?

XX refuses to give up. She's already done all of the studying, incorporating sex's forms and cues into her developing body. The way sex connects and wiles. The complexity of the subject of her art and the unseen workings of the society that bear it deserve this power—its command, its unity. She abandons the fusion of art and sex and turns her own body into the canvas sex so desires, all while painting her own forlorn feelings about the truth of this unseen power struggle. She becomes Fig, a courtesan, bravely seeking a way to reconcile the gap between the two.

But sex is an animal from the past, an arm of a much larger, immediate force abhorrent of its loss of influence in the socialized world. Through its proponents and tendrils of instinct, it captures her in its web, robbing her of her artistic freedom, and soon, Fig is convinced that between her art and her body, the latter is the more powerful. Is art so effete and hollow, that it could not stand up to such a wild, ancient miasma? XX, shoved deep down into the persona of Fig, reduced to an abstraction herself, suffers.

It is only with the urgings of an art collector enamored with her abstract work that XX is able to gain the will to climb back up to the top of her consciousness. Emboldened by training at the College under a harsh teacher, XX then prepares to take Fig back for herself. But how? Wouldn't such a movement be an exemplar of the very arch rival she seeks to defeat?

With a hope in purple, XX faces her final challenge in reclaiming her art from sex's clutches, defeating her captor with that very reclamation, and creating her masterpiece.

The players: