Misfits Managed

January 2016 I began my Drawing II class, where I was challegnged to make my own project and follow my own deadlines for the semester.  From this came Misfits Managed.  I knew I wanted to explore the wold I created more, and maybe have Majorie as the main character, but somehow that didn’t seem right.

I recalled my earlier readings of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics (which is a wonderful purchase) of how he suggested to start characters and stories based on arch-types.  One arch-type that is commonly used by Scott himself and many other cartoons are the four elements, earth, water, fire, and air.  I decided that was too overdone for me, I wanted to try something different and challenge myself.  So I thought about the five senses, what they mean to me, and how could I possibly build characters based on them?

At first I tried going with a lack of the sense, for example what does a character without the trait of smell do?  How does he behave?  And can I take this less literally?  I played with the idea of someone who always had their nose in the air, figuratively, refused to stop to smell the roses, etc.  I kept toying with the same world that Majorie and Hamlet were in, but none of it seemed to fit smoothly.

*SPOILERS!*

When I was thinking about early drafts for this world,  wanted “perfect” animals to be the “default” or beginning creatures of the land.  But then “misfits” or combination animals would start to appear. So why was this?  Were there scientists experimenting with different animals in the name of medicine and evolution?  Did two-species couples want a child that resembled both of them?  I ended up deciding that two animals who bred together could not produce a mixed child.  But this wasn’t the reason for the scientists experiments, mainly.  The scientists wanted to see how far they could push themselves, how far they could develop their tech and their bodies to further advance their kind.

Their experimentation probably came to my mind from the early pokemon movies with Mew Two and a similar fan idea from the video game Undertale, where a popular theory is that two characters were created for destruction by a scientist.

Unfortunately with great power comes great responsibility, and the scientists weren’t too keen on responsibility.  One of their first and earliest creations, the First Misfit, ended up escaping the lab.  He was enormous, gigantic, and terrifying looking.  He looked just like a Frankenstein's monster of animals.  Naturally people were frightened at what they couldn’t understand, especially such a huge creature who was made to look terrifying.  He was clumsy and accidentally killed a few people.  In the process the perfects turned on him.  More lab creations escaped, and some even seemed to spring up from the ground.

*END SPOILERS*

It took six heroes of magical being to stop the misfits in their tracks and cast them out of the village.  When I was creating these heroes I wanted to take from the five senses and add a sixth, the sense of spirit/psychic sense.  I chose five animals to represent the opposite of their respective senses, rhinos for example have poor eyesight so I chose him to represent sight.  So there were five creatures who represented the opposite of the five senses and one who was a pure representation of the sixth sense.  This makes for an unsteady barrier, which broke a few hundred years after being erected.

This was when misfit children started being born, and because the last encounter with misfits went so terribly the perfects immediately cast them out.  These children were just born, and often times their parents were cast out with them as a form of punishment for making such an evil being.

Another couple hundred years go by, Blanc is being a pure kitten minding his own business, sleeping comfortably at night when he suddenly turns into a creature resembling the First Misfit.  His parents are terrified and angry, they quickly remove him from their home and cast him out too.  Blanc’s transformations are for the most part nightly, although I’m tempted to stick Blanc in his Misfit form permanently.

So this is the basic beginning of the story before Blanc in a nutshell, but now what am I supposed to do with Blanc? What is his journey, his purpose, why is he like this, can it be fixed, does he want it to be fixed, etc.

As I toyed with different ideas, I settled on making Blanc a sort of binding hero to bring both the misfits and the perfects together.  Neither race is complete without the other.  Blanc’s misfit form is an accumulation of the five senses, touch (gorilla), sight (tarsiers), taste (catfish), smell (dog), and hearing (elephant). This makes him the perfect candidate for being a uniter, since he has experiences of both a perfect and a misfit,

At this time, I still wanted to bring Majorie and Hamlet back into the picture.  I decided that  wanted Blanc to have mentors/supporting cast to help him along his journey.  Majorie could easily represent the sense of taste, and Hamlet hearing being a rabbit and all.  I still needed characters for each of the other senses, and ended up creating Jenna (thompson’s gazelle/elephant), Lloyd (wolf/ram), Amber (badger/millipede), and representing touch is an otter/mantis shrimp hybrid.  I still have yet to name this female character.  Most of these hybrids follows an interesting pattern I hadn’t picked up on first - they’re all opposite creatures of each other.  Such as Hamlet’s rabbit/hawk hybrid.  Hawks eat rabbits.  They’re total opposite.  Majorie is a literal cat-fish, she’s part cat and part catfish. There is only one character who breaks this pattern, Jenna.  Elephants are purported not to have any natural enemies since they are so hard to take down in the first place, and while I did play with the idea of a lion/elephant hybrid I’d already made Jenna and grown deeply attached to her.

A long, long, long time ago we were Perfect. We hadn't known we were Perfect yet, but a lot of us thought it. Perfect animals of all kinds lived in harmony for thousands of years. 

One day, the First Misfit rose from the ground and attacked us. More smaller Misfits started showing up and attacking too. Momma and Daddy said a lot of people died.

Our elders looked through the old libraries and found the Perfect Star, an old symbol we'd always had. We used it to drive back the Misfits and built our city in its shape. No Misfit could ever cross the symbol.

This worked for a long while until Misfit babies started being born. No one knew how or why, they just were. A lot of parents and children were thrown Outside. After a few years they decided that there were enough Misfits and Impures out there that they could just send off Misfit babies whenever they were born on a train.

I was lucky, I was born to some really nice parents.  Oh, I used to be a kitten by the way.  My Mom was a gray tabby and my Dad was pure white.  They were really pretty together.

About a year ago, I changed into this ... thing.  I don’t know what it is, it’s not me.  I was sleeping at night, and I woke up like this.

I thanked the stars I changed back when the sun came up.  From that moment on I would change into that Misfit every night and change back each morning.

I was able to hide it for a week or two, but my parents found out.  They took me to a doctor to see what was wrong, but she couldn’t find anything.  So we went to go see more doctors and scientists.  They did a lot of tests and experiments.  It was really scary.

Once I tried to hold it in ... and now the changes last for days.  There was no cure.  I was going to be suck changing from me to the Misfit my entire life.

Because they couldn’t make me stay ‘me’ they had to send me Outside, so now I’m here.

I don’t know what I am, why I am the way I am.  How I got this way ...

They sent me out here a few days ago, I haven’t seen anyone else yet ...