Vixen: Character Sketches

Welp, this week I've finalized the designs for all of the characters that will be appearing in my senior comic, "Vixen." There are two main characters--Lorna and Miss May--and then several minor characters that are infinitely less interesting than the first two.

So here we go. This is Lorna Forester, the protagonist. She has extreme self-consciousness issues and becomes rather susceptible to the lure of the Vixen clan.

And this would be Miss May. Leader of the Vixen clan and general hottie. I have a hard time calling her the antagonist because the story is more complex than simple good vs. evil, but she's the closest to a physical antagonist. She's also the love interest of Lorna. c:

On to the minor characters, who all quite frankly bore me. They have their purposes in the story, but giving them any depth would require taking this to a fat ass graphic novel and that's not what I'm going for. Here we have Lorna's father, William, sister Elizabeth, Clarice, and Henrietta.

Onto concept sketches for the monster hallucinations! This story is very based around reality and fantasy blurring, and at several points, full-blown hallucinations take over in the form of some rather terrifying banshee/werewolf hybrids.

That's it for character sketches! I have the whole thing fully scripted at this point, a schedule all set up for the next three months, and now I'm just struggling with thumbnailing 40 pages at once. Which is what I'm finding the most difficult. I've set my schedule to complete four pages a week, from pencils to finish. I knew trying to get all the pencils done before I started inking wouldn't work, so I'm pacing it out, letting myself do both parts each week rather than doing six weeks of penciling and then six weeks of inking.

Only problem is...I need thumbnails. And I have the same problem with thumbnails as I do pencils. I can't do more than a few thumbnails at once before they start to suck. I'm spoiled by my webcomic schedule where I only have to thumbnail a page before I start it, giving me plenty of time to recharge my page design powers. I might have to see if I can stretch this out as well, seeing as I only have...four pages laid out. Haha oh god and the real work begins.

MCAD Senior Project: "Vixen"

Partially to promote the project, but also to catalogue my storytelling process, I'm going to begin making posts about my senior comic project at MCAD.

THE PROJECT: Create at least 14 full realized, professionally produced comic pages by the end of the semester.
MY PROJECT: Do some crazy shit, make it at least 40 pages long, carry out to print, lesbians.

40 pages seems like a lot, but I work pretty quickly under a deadline, and I always have the summer to finish up any pages since I graduate in December. The way it works at MCAD is that your senior project then becomes your senior show when you graduate. I'm lucky enough to be graduating early, so I get to claim the best wall space and have an extra semester to print and fuss over presentation.

So, once upon a time I was a silly art school kid who thought that she could finish up the first 200 page volume of her webcomic and take up ALL THE WALL SPACE and it would be amazing. But she had too many credits and was too neurotic and ended up shifting her senior project to a whole year before she had planned to do it. So she didn't have a story until two weeks ago when she doodled a naked lady with a fox mask.

Initial "Vixen" sketch

The story came after. I had been drawing random characters with different kinds of taxidermy as masks/heads for the past few weeks, so when I did this, I hadn't thought much about it. But it sparked an idea of a "vixen" who was morbidly obsessed with beauty and slaughtered her victims in a forest. And then, as is so typical of me, I felt the urge to turn it into yet another story that blurs fantasy and reality fueled by sociopathy. Refer to "The Lament of Miss Tidbits" that I did in the winter.

Final page of "The Lament of Miss Tidbits"

So this past week I've been fleshing out the story, getting a script down, character designs, all that jazz. I've also spent a good amount of time thinking of what this story means. Hot, gory lesbian scenes and crazy fox masks are quite nice and all, but since I kind of came up with this story on the spot I've really had to work through developing the underlying messages. In this process, I think I've unearthed old personal issues that I had actually forgotten existed.

Long ago, in the dark ages of high school, I was a dancer. A fucking ballerina at that. It was fun and I loved it, don't get me wrong, but the pressure of maintaining that "ballerina" physique was enormous. It didn't affect me too much personally, but I saw it all around me. At every recital at least a quarter of the girls would have meltdowns because classmates, teachers, hell, even mothers would judge them for not fitting into the costume right. It was sickening.

I guess "Vixen" (I guess that's what I'm calling it at this point.) represents the sickness of modern body image by idolizing beauty in a sociopathic way. Yes, I am aware that I sound like I'm full of it. Maybe I am. But there are lesbians! YAY LESBIANS.

Here is one of them now.

"Vixen" Promo

And now, after all of my rambling of meaning and concept, I present you with an unofficial synopsis of the story:

In a town in nineteenth century England, girls are going missing. Some say it's a mad man; others say it's a pack of wolves. No one knows but Lorna, who accidentally finds the criminals behind the abductions--the Vixen clan of the forest. The clan gives her a choice: be ruthlessly cannibalized, or join them and become one of the beautiful, bloodthirsty Vixen. Can Lorna make the transformation into the clan, or will she be too repulsed by the true nature of the Vixen?

Character designs and other process work to come! I hope everyone looks forward to this story as much as I do. c:

(Also, feedback and critique is more than welcomed. I'm getting good feedback from school, but I'd like to hear a broader, perhaps more reader-based view as well. c: )