click to visit larger image Epic of Sally Robertson: page 56 From the Fenworks |
It’s the penultimate page of book #2! We’ve got just one more page and some cover art between us and more printed copy!
Also, now that Jenifer is here, things are really gonna start hopping. There are still lots of gag strips waiting to be used here and there for daily life in Jam and 5th grade at Bayview Elementary, but the story is going to start to take a more prominent place in the comic from now on. In other comics I’ve read, its at this point where we might lose readers and gain others. When a comic changes like this, it can be jarring. I’m hoping to make the transition logical and engaging, but we’ll see. So far, when it’s collected as a book it works, though.
Why does Jenifer hale a change in the story? Because she’s the first. I mean, technically, Ian encountered Fenmere long before anyone else. However, Jenifer was the first character I wrote about. I have a short story that I’ve been sitting on since 1997 with illustrations in the works that focuses on her adventures in this world. And of all the humans in this story, she’s the one most en-wrapped in the greater plot. Without spoiling anything, and as we shall see, she can act as both an Oracle and a Mentor for Sally.
Part of the reason I’m writing the story this way is that in my life my babysitters and the older kids I’d hang out with were the ones to introduce my brother and I to the game of make believe and to the bizarre world of pop culture. It’s a social mechanism that I haven’t seen explored in comics much, not even in Calvin and Hobbes where the baby sitter was a major character.
I mean, we played make believe before we met our older friends, but we didn’t call it that until then. Our friends brought it to the level of D&D, a certain deliberation and a set of rules and guidelines that we never had before that brought an intensity to the exercise that we never had before. It was FUN. A true escape. The sharing of imaginations.
Epic of Sally Robertson: Enter the Babysitter originally appeared on Drawing Contraption on 2013/10/22.