Characters

Manda follows the beat of her own drum, and likes having a good time. Unfortunately, this can make her a bit of a bully and a troublemaker.

Jade is unfortunately the odd duck out in the group of my four main OCs, where everyone else grew up together.

James only shows up briefly here! She's the most conscientious and "responsible." She deosn't endorse a bit of dangerous fun but she won't argue too hard against it either.

Benze is my weird kid who gets to have my love of bugs and running around in the forest. His chosen friends are older than him, but he doesn't really have anyone his own age to hang around with.

About

This was my first time actually putting my OCs in a little story and I was very nervous about making it hold itself together properly. 10 Pages isn't a whole lot of space to introduce characters, give them a problem, and reach some sort of resolution, but I felt like more would be unwieldly for my first fully original comic.

My first step was actually to go back and adjust character designs so I could keep everyone consistent. This helped a lot with getting back into who my characters are and how I wanted them to interact.

The bulk of the hard work for me was in my initial planning stage, since I didn't want to be adjusting panels and framing as I worked through colouring.

Some pages remained the same! Some did not! I got really attached to some of the rough sketches.

I did end up making some changes as I worked and could better imagine the characters interacting. I feel like I don't know everything I need to about my own characters yet. Bringing them out of their little box to run around for a small comic has helped me become more confident in my understanding of how they might react to one another in various situations, their desires and what they might do to achieve them.

I chose to call the story "Green Lane" because it's tangential to the main The Match Alight story I've wanted to tell. It was fun to take a step back, let Benze take the POV, and think about my characters from another angle. (...while still indulging myself with Jade obviously not telling their full story or what their goal is in the forest)

I'm extremely glad to have pushed myself into writing a bit for this anthology, it feels good to have made something for my little guys! And feels better knowing others were working alongside me on similar projects.

Thank you for looking at my little guys!