F16 - Animal Magnetism P1

And now, back to Forever 16. As I mentioned in my journal a little while back, in my efforts to make this series more attractive to publishers, I’m dumping the comic strip format – I had fun doing it like that, sure, but it was just too confusing to too many people. Instead, I’m going to do short stories of varying length, which I can collect together in books. But it’s still going to be set in the 1990s, because I feel like these characters fit that time period best. They’re awkward rebellious teenagers, and they’re perfectly suited to the atmosphere of that grungy, cynical, do-it-yourself decade. I even decided to color these stories in grayscale, so they look more like an independently published comic book from the ‘90s.

And instead of skipping all over the place like I did with the strips, I want to do this in a more linear fashion, starting from early in 1990 and progressing straight through the decade. So yeah, even though I plan to use the same timeline of events as the strips, you can sort of think of this as a reboot if you want. This story predates Joel’s relationship with Michelle – I wanted to do a couple of these kinds of stories before she’s introduced, focusing on all the crazy girls Joel dates before her. For years, I’ve had an idea in mind where Joel goes out with some spacey New Age hippie chick, based on my…shall we say, “skepticism” of holistic living. This story’s only going to be about six or seven pages long, but I do believe I’ll enjoy drawing it.