Sunnyville Stories

For those of you who missed the first and second installment of this series, go back and read them now.  I’ll wait.  When you’re done, proceed onward.

As I explained last time, I had created this world.  It was a big world with this village where everyone dressed traditionally and time seemingly stood still.  It was remote, being surrounded by unspoiled wilderness in all directions.  This hamlet needed a name and I struggled with it for awhile.  It had to have a name that defined its demeanor, something that had to establish immediately to the viewer.  Since this idea was inspired by Maple Town, I tried saying various names over that conveyed a sense of tranquility.  Some of the names I came up with in this design phase were Rose Town, Rosy Town, Sun Town, Sunton, Paxville, and Sunnytown.

In the end, I came up with the name “Sunnyville” after trying out a few combinations.  My instincts told me that this would work and it had a nice ring to it.  From there on, I developed the concept some more.  As I said before, I didn’t know what I was going to do with this world.  I could have just concentrated on the day-to-day lives of the townspeople, but that alone would have been boring.  Sunnyville Stories would not have worked in that case.  You have to understand that comics is a very personal medium.  For a comic to work, you have to be able to connect with the reader.  If you are unable to connect with a reader, then your comic won’t work.

Early version of Rusty

As I said in the last entry, I remembered how the first episode of Maple Town had Patty Rabbit and her family arriving in their new hometown by train.  That really got my brain working.  I recalled some of my own personal experiences having moved to a radically different location.  So I invented a character for the readers to view this traditional looking village with – the character of Rusty.  Rusty was there from the start.  I conceived him as a teenager who had to leave behind everything he knew and move to this very strange looking place.  We’ve all heard stories about characters moving…but I still felt something was not quite right.

Rusty was a teenager.  He was unsure of himself and he needed someone to relate to and confide in.  That’s how I created Samantha or “Sam” for short.

I should emphasize right now that the Samantha I created back in 2005 was quite different from the one you know now in Sunnyville Stories.  In fact, she was not a cat – Samantha was a rabbit! Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, I have not been able to locate my old sketchbooks from that time period so I can’t share with you the concept art I did for Samantha.   Continue reading →

Getting back to how Sunnyville Stories came to be, the years went by and I drew on an on/off basis through high school and college.  It wasn’t until my final year of college in 2002 that I started drawing on a regular basis.  I was not a natural artist – I was NOT a childhood prodigy and wasn’t from an artistic family.  Knowing that many people were so much better than me and had the advantage of going to art school, this made me more determined to improve my drafting skills and show everyone how good I was.

It was sometime in 2003 that I came up with an idea for a comics series called “Animal Pens”.  I’d later retroactively title it “Bleu’s Forest”.  In fact, the old page is still up – I’ve since abandoned it.  The story was influenced in part by a 1980s cartoon series from Canada I used to watch called the Raccoons.  The comic involved the adventures of a young red fox named Bleu who lived with his childhood friends, a married couple named Warren and Lori.  They had various adventures in a big forest filled with magic and mythical creatures.

Bleu’s Forest cartoon

You can see here an early example of my work.  While my writing was solid and the humor was definitely there (I had practiced writing jokes and do have a creative writing degree), my art was abysmal.  Undaunted by the poor drawing and the poor reception I got, I kept at it.   Continue reading →