Having joined second year after a period in London, I didn’t find out about the project when everyone else did and I returned a newbie with a new class. It wasn’t until late August that I received the summer project brief so I had a lot of catching up to do, we were tasked with writing a comic story and designing the relevant characters that would play a large part in the narrative. The overall aim was to have all of the required research, story drafts, character designs and backstories, as well as an A3 comic panel board by the time we return in September; I surprisingly managed to achieve most of this.

I was obviously riddled with stress over how little time I had to do this project, but I managed to use the stress as motivation to get as much of the project done as I could, I did my best to plan out how I was going to tackle the brief by making a lot of notes in a notebook and I made a mental note of how I was going to manage my time, planning each stage of the project and timeframe for aspects such as development ahead of time. I am aware that I should start making either a paper or digital record of my mental timetable to show evidence of this and I will take this step in the future.  I decided to revisit an old character that I originally began to develop on the first year of this course before I went to London, that character was Skaadi, the demon warrior elf. With it being a new project and myself being in a different place artistically, I opted to redesign the character completely and tweak her backstory to give it more substance in the context of a fully realised narrative.  I decided to link her narrative to the ongoing crisis of the Amazon Rainforest being destroyed and burned down in the name of capitalism and economic growth. I also added a couple of supporting characters, such as Normund, her side kick/ reptilian father figure and the Light Elf race, the species that originally exiled her from her home city as a child. I also fleshed out the city and the world that it resides on, something I did not do previously as back then, we only needed a character, not a full narrative. I was rather excited to pursue her story; she always was a character that I relatedto and hoped that I would be able to write about fully someday.

For the story I wanted to make it relevant to the current state of our world so that readers could relate to the story in some way and hopefully see Skaadi as someone they could get along with and relate to, someone who wasn’t necessarily a hero but did heroic things to make a change for the better in the world, someone who was still trying to find her place. In a way, Skaadi resembles Greta Thurnburg as she too is fighting to save the planet from the forces that seem so intent on destroying the home that we have under the false pre-tense that more power, bigger cities, plastic paraphernalia and excessive consumption is actually good for us. Being a nature and animal lover who wants to protect our ecosystem, my decision to link my story to the current crisis in the Amazon Rainforest was in the hope that if one day my comic gets published, then it can help to educate readers on why we need to protect the environment and provide them with realistic narrative set in an otherwise unrealistic place.

As well as the story, I created initial designs for the three main characters, completed all of my research and wrote backstories and character profiles for Skaadi, Normund and the Light Elves. Overall I think I did really well to achieve this much in such a short time frame over the summer, even if I did not think so at the time. I must admit I was panicking that I did not have enough work for when I returned in September, since I hadn’t finished the whole project… it wasn’t until I returned that I found out I had another 8 weeks to do this project and I had done more than enough to lay the groundwork for me to build off of over that time. I research Lise Myhre, Mike Dringenberg, Neil Gaiman and Ashley Wood because I thought that the combination of their art styles and literary styles would help me a lot with writing my own story and designing characters. I had a vision of the reimagined Skaadi