The idea of making some sort of comic or artistic story with the characters that were floating around my head was always something I wanted to act on. I really never pushed myself to do it until this came along. Sometime in October of 2016, I gathered up my pencils and $30 drawing tablet and decided to get to work - getting the ideas out of my head and onto paper.
The characters, known as Maddie and Jules, have evolved and changed over the years and their personalities are different than when I made this. Maddie was a naive rich girl who's bubbly and air-headed personality would clash with the poor and cynical Jules. Each issue was meant to follow their adventures and the humor was meant to come from one of the characters not understanding some part of the other's life.
Plots included things like Maddie's failure to understand why Jules can't just buy a new phone on the whim, Jules' attempts to use proper table manners when in company of Maddie's family, or the two giving their perspective on people and events that happened in school.
I gave up on the idea for a few reasons:
The characters felt shallow and limited.
I'm not good at writing humor
- so I questioned why in the world I decided to try a comedic webcomic.
I didn't like the art.
At this point, I had rarely drawn comics in any form and only had practice with realism. Drawing comics in a style I could be proud of was something I wanted to do from the start but I realized I needed to practice plenty more.
I decided to do away with the comedic webcomic series after 2 issues.
However, I did cling onto the characters, hoping that I could give them a bit more personality and depth in some other future project.
Looking back, you can see that while some aspects of the characters have changed, a vast majority of traits they held in this webcomic still come through in their Heroine Rises counterparts.
Madeline/Maddie is still rich and sheltered, but nowhere near as empty-headed as she was in this comic. Julian/Jules is still relatively poor, but has lost that cynicism and lethargy in exchange for a softer and more balanced personality.
The concept pages and anything else related to this series are now avaliable under the 'One Shot' section on the comics page if you want to take a look at it!