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: )