Happy New Year: A Look Back Over the Decade

It’s a new year, it’s a new decade! A lot of interesting things have happened in the past decade but I want to focus on my growth over the years. The best way to illustrate how I’ve grown is to compare pages from StepSisters. StepSisters in it’s entirety has been going on for 8 years going on 9. It has grown and evolved much like myself over the course of its years. Since its humble beginning back in 2011, it has been through four separate incarnations. Some of which never made it past the first chapter.

As it grew, the original concept of the story has stayed the same but the characters, the events they experienced and the outcome of the story itself has changed. The details and execution was always changing because the story grew as I grew and learned new methods of storytelling. I also grew out of the habit of centering a sole Black character in lands where Black people weren’t visible to having an already inclusive setting for the story.

And of course my art has grown by leaps and bounds. The picture on the right is from the very first incarnation of StepSisters. In 2011, my first foray into digital art and I believe that all of this was before I even acquired my first tablet. There were so many things that I was still learning and so many things that I never even thought of attempting. This version made it to two chapters. Like the other versions soon to come after it, I stopped because the story and the art weren’t progressing in the fashion that I was hoping it would. The disconnect between what I wanted it to be and what my skill set allowed me to put out was so great that I felt that the only thing I could possibly do was to stop and go back to the drawing board.

The versions between the first and the current incarnation have been through the same process. I would start it but feel as if the story, and my art, were not there yet. And as such, they would all get scrapped. However, during the down time between versions the development on it never stopped. I immersed myself in fiction and comics that closely represented the styles I wanted for StepSisters: the tone, the pace of the story, the different ways I could explore the characters that were true to their respective personalities. Every version was a new experiment that implemented the new information I had exposed myself to.

However, it wasn’t until I had started working on this version of StepSisters, which was published back in July of 2017, that I felt like it was how I envisioned it to be way back when I was still a young girl starting high school. The next image is a page from Chapter 3 (2019) and compared to the first page you can clearly see how despite the changed implemented, the key components of the story have survived the chopping block. As Mariya and Sara (formerly Seira) have always been enemies/rivals/what-have-you, Sara’s introduction to the story has always been formatted to clearly state to the audience that she was in fact an antagonist. So a preliminary showdown before we get into the heavy hitting parts of the story to establish this connection was always intended to be in the slot where it is.