Went to visit my parents, which often means checking my childhood art. A lot of it is very hard to scan, because it has faded away so much with the years, but I'll try to digitally enhace the contrast, and share some later.
Ancient art from 2002, from some clearly Jungle Book inspired comic series I did back in my preteen and teen days. Why yes, I'm old.
The gray wolf, Asta, actually made it to the very early dA days!
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Some history:
Back in 1995 or 96, as a kid, I asked for this book as a birthday gift: https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_842587-MLA27484653922_062018-O.webp . I was obsessed with tigers back then (with foxes before that!) and well, there was a tiger on the cover, plus tiger info inside the book. It detailed the fauna of each continent, and while my most visited section was Asia, I remember being saddened to see that South America, where I live, has the least amount of pages of all. It mentioned being the most biodiverse continent, but it still made a point to describe our fauna as "lacking in large animals". This bothered me, back then.
Those days, I lived where I was born, in the Argentine North-East. In the humid Chaco region, which is insanely biodiverse, and even more so back in the 90's, when it was less urbanized than it is today. Now, I've been living in the South-West, AndinoPatagonico forest region for almost one decade and half. A less biodivrse area, albeit rich in regional endemisms.
In my childhood, I'd turn rocks and wood pieces just to check the diversity of all sort of invertebrates below (and yes, it was often very gross). I'd also pick flowers, fruits and herbs apart, to see how they were built.
I also remember the absolutely insane diversity of frogs and reptiles, not to mention the birds (which sadly I'd not look at much , in my childhood) that could be found in our patio... it was a given, and only in retrospective I come to appreciate the insane amount of species, I know I'd have a field day nowadays!
Anyway: my childhood house and town/area were insanely formative to me, when it comes to appreciating local/South American fauna, even if I started out with Asian-based characters.
And yes, I had a ringed-tail Lemur character way before the Madagascar franchise existed. He was, of course, created after getting that book (character was created in '97 or '98). My logic back then was, Asia and specifically India shared a lot of species with Africa (rhinos, elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, jackals, etc) so, why not lemurs? Getting a wee bit older (read: teens) I decided the lemur was an escaped former pet or whatever, but never adressed it in the comics becuase I didn't care.
So yeah. Always fun to revisit childhood art! I was 15-16 in 2002.
