SketchDump 2017 - A Billion For Boris

Here's a SketchDump '17 special: the only remnant of a humongous project that went absolutely nowhere. In the same vein as my effort to rework my old "JTV" series from when I was a kid, this was another attempted return to an ambitious art project from 20 years ago. And when I say "ambitious", I mean it, which is why this one fell by the wayside pretty quick. The more I thought about it, the more I knew it'd be too much for me to take on.

When I was in fourth grade, I read the book Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers for a book report. It's probably more well known for its 1976 movie adaptation (or more infamously for its awful 2003 remake). Then in fifth grade, I read the book's sequel, A Billion For Boris, which has never been adapted to a movie as far as I know - which I thought was a bummer, since I actually found this book more interesting. So I decided to adapt it myself, in the form of a behemoth 50-page comic that filled up almost an entire sketch pad. As poor as the artwork was, and as weak as my writing was at the time, I'm still proud of myself that I was able to polish off something that huge when I was only ten years old. And several times throughout the twenty years since, I've thought about remaking that comic.

This row of character designs was from my most recent brainstorm on that subject. The story itself is pretty straightforward - Annabel Andrews' tech-obsessed little brother Ben fixes up an old TV set and miraculously manages to get it to broadcast tomorrow's programs today - including live news and sports that haven't happened yet. Annabel tries to use this boon of future knowledge to help people in her community, while her best friend Boris uses it to place winning bets on horse racing and earn enough money to buy a better life for him and his scatterbrained single mother. I thought about tweaking a few elements of the story here and there, though - in the book, only Annabel, Boris, and Ben know about the TV's secret, but I decided it'd be more interesting if a few of their other friends got in on it too. The book had that "keeping a huge supernatural secret hidden from our friends and family" angle that I've never enjoyed doing in fiction, so I wanted to widen the scope of the story to a few other kids in Annabel's social circle.

The biggest change I had in mind was for that character on the far end there. In my vision for the story, Bartholomew Bacon is a wiry nerdy kid in Annabel's class who harbors a secret crush on her and ultimately turns out to be using the TV for far less scrupulous activities. In the book, Bartholomew still had a crush on Annabel...but he was a 24-year-old newspaper reporter, and Annabel is stated in the text to be 14. This plot thread had flown clean over my fifth grade head twenty years prior - when I re-read the book as an adult, I was duly squicked out, and my first thought was "Oh, that's gotta go, for sure." Sometimes, Truer To The Text isn't necessarily a good thing.

In designing the characters this time, I went for a mid-'70s aesthetic, to echo the look of the 1976 Disney movie that was based on the first book. I even designed Annabel to look like a teenage Jodie Foster, who played Annabel in the movie. You know me, I love doing period pieces - but considering I have another massive one going on right now that I work on every day, there was no time for another one. Despite my best efforts to redo this 20-year-old comic of mine, I think I have to just face up to reality and leave it in the past.