Wings of the Spririt
In june 2004, a competition was announced for european manga fan artists. Organized by the Dutch magazine "Aniway", the best manga's submitted would be published in the "Fanthology" manga pocket book. Taking on all of Europe, including the best dutch manga artists, was a challenge I could not resist.
The assignment: draw a manga of an original, stand-alone story, 8 to 14 pages, utilising the traits of the manga style..
Developing a manga
Genre
First, I decided on a genre. Being somewhat familiar with the dutch manga scene, I expected most submissions to be comical stories. So to stand out, and provide some variety to the pocket book, I figured I'd do something different from that. I usually do comical action comics myself, but I decided to do a serious story this time. With some action of course. It became an action drama, even though I normally dislike dramas.
main character(s)
| Next I focused on coming up with a main character. Different from the usual "just a regular girl" type. A character that would be special enough to carry a story that would linger in the reader's mind.
I thought about elves, magical girls, etc. and their possible stories. I didn't want to make some standard fantasy story either. Somewhere along I came up with a gargoyle woman, living in a regular world. That would make a special main character. However, this character would stand out too much in a regular world to be able to lead a life of her own. So I came up with a twist: she would transform into a normal girl. Enter the "curse"-idea. Thinking more on the transformation idea, I wanted to avoid being unoriginal as much as possible. We've already seen human to monster transformations in the Incredible Hulk, whenever he gets angry. I chose the transformation to be unrelated to the girl's emotional state. The gargoyle spirit within the girl takes over when there is injustice at hand, and only late in the evenings. Were the transformation rule to apply to daytime as well, one could hardly keep it a secret. Both girl and gargoyle lead seperate lives. And to make things interesting, neither one shares the thoughts or memories of the other. Only the same body. Eventually, both characters became worthy enough to be the main character. |
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The lead character is Yvonne. A 16-17 year old highschool girl. Somewhat timid, with a good sense of humour and irony. | |
| Her best friend, Sandra, is slightly older and more mature than Yvonne, and lives alone with her mother. Sandra's mother owns a clothing store at the mall, so Sandra tends to dress herself fashionably. Sandra likes to drag Yvonne along for company, and they usually have a good time together. |  | |
The story of this manga started with a feeling. Yvonne's feeling to be exact.
It's about "gifts" and "curses" and how one can often turn out to be the other.
Some people think it's cool to be able to transform into some powerful creature, but to Yvonne, it's a curse. The transformation hurts. Hey, how would you feel if you suddenly sprung wings and all your skin pigments would rearrange? Besides that, Yvonne's clothes often shred because of the wings and the fact that the gargoyle woman's form is larger than Yvonne's clothes will fit. So Yvonne has to buy clothes often. All in all: it's not pleasant.
Actually, I started the manga with a different plot in mind than I ended with. The original plot revolved around the relationship between girl and gargoyle. Since only one of them could occupy the girl's body and mind, neither could ever "meet" the other. At one point in that storyline, Yvonne gets home from a gargoyle's night out. She once again finds her clothes torn and her skin full of scathes. Then she looks into the mirror, thinking "I wonder who she is.". At the ending, the gargoyle once again returns to Yvonne's room, browses around a little, stops by the same mirror, and wonders the exact same thing... The End
But, one of the requirements of the contest was that the story would not have an open ending. And this ending was a little too open after all, I figured. So I decided to change the ending. In doing so, I also had to rearrange the other scenes, and start at a different point in the story, to make it read more natural.
The final version of the story starts out more or less the same, but changes halfway through; Yvonne and Sandra find themselves in trouble, Yvonne transforms and the gargoyle woman saves the day. For the first time, Yvonne is glad she transformed, and she sees her curse in a different light from then on.
Below are the first three pages of the complete story. My submission for the competition did not include these, because they didn't fit in the page limit. The manga I submitted started on the fourth page, which I also made the title page.
| page 1 | page 2 | page 3 |
| page 4 / title page | ||
What's special about this manga
I'm great at beginning stories, but not good at ending them. It's my big weakness. To get around this, I made several new 'beginnings' in the manga. Much like the beginning of a new chapter in a book. As a side-effect, almost every page ends with a cliffhanger that makes you want to turn to the next page.
This was my first time drawing for pocket book size. I discovered that this type of pages fit a whole different kind of layout possibilities than A4. Consequently, the 14 page limit was very restricting, and I had to plan which scenes to put on which pages to stick to the limit. The page limit turned out to be my manga's biggest flaw: because I had to scratch and shrink so many scenes in order to fit, story events follow each other up too fast, Which makes the story read somewhat childish. I've certainly learned that I need to find a way around page limits!
Timeframe
| june 2004 | start |
| august 2004 | missed evaluation |
| januari 2005 | -break- |
| februari 2005 | finishing |
| march 1st 2005 | deadline |
In august 2004, there was an opportunity to have my manga evaluated. I worked really hard to get at least 12 pages done by that time, and I did! unfortunately I arrived 2 minutes after the evaluation ended, so that turned out a futile effort -_-. In the weeks after, I was too tired of drawing so fast then, that I couldn't get much done.
Background info
- The gargoyle woman's character design was inspired by the Disney series "Gargoyles". A great series if you ask me. I didn't give her a tail because, well, that'd be embarassing after transformation. Her wings are more designed like a butterfly's than like a bat's wings. I made several wing designs first.
- The outfits in the manga are my own 'designs', after looking around a bit for references. Yvonne's clothes in particular needed extra attention, because of her transformations. If you look closer in the manga, you'd see that the outfit Yvonne is wearing on the Halloween shopping night is actually a sow job of the outfit that got shredded by the first transformation in scene 1, two weeks earlier. The pants are a more loose type as well, so that they won't rip when she turns into the gargoyle woman. She did snap most of the strings holding her outfit together in the second transformation though. It's all about details ^_^. I love doing such 'realism' details.
- Another point: on the last page, the epilogue, Yvonne's wearing a coat to school. Why? Because Halloween is around october, and it's cold that time of year.
- I spent quite some time around shoe stores too. To my surprise, I discovered the bad guy's simple shoe design actually exists. I combined some regular elements to draw shoes for the girls that fit their personalities.
- To make the dialogues clearer, I used a different font style for the gargoyle woman's text. In my next manga's I will try to do this more often, matching font styles according to the characters' voices.
- Alass, my manga was not chosen to be included in "Fanthology", but I have gained a story and characters that will stay part of me forever. And maybe, I'll publish it myself someday.