Today is January 23rd, 2024 and the anniversary of my first long term attempt at webcomic that I started when I was fourteen. Despite having shelved it long ago back in college, I still privately celebrate it every year in my heart as a personal milestone, as the comic in question; "Faeries Bible" was the first time I committed to a single project for any long period of time, running for 7 years with 150 pages plus 2 short 10-12 page spinoffs.
I don't do something every year but decided to indulge myself by drawing a tribute, not of Faeries Bible characters specifically, but a tribute to all the stories and OCs that came before it from the time I was 11 to the time I was 14, at the point I stopped calling each story my first, my second, my third, etc. story. There were many ideas that never left the concept phase, but these were the ones I stuck with long enough to be considered stories.
So this year I decided to indulge some old (fictional) friends.
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I thiiiink I had been planning on doing a psuedo crossover between Open Element and Forget me Not, and this was me drawing the gay (Trans) characters meeting each other...
Similarly to another piece there is a colored version of this sleeping deep in my Gaia online account haha! But OMG this might be the best these two have ever looked!
While the first act of the story had Mokida on sort of a solo isekai mission assembling her team of spirit energy wielding guardians, the second act eventually has her encounter the other six Grand Spirit characters, who are mostly there to make Mokida feel inadequate as they all had their own untold adventures and they have more professional guardians and not only that they have these unlock Spirit battle forms and Mokida has NONE of that, just her, who can't even walk, and a rag tag group of 2nd rate guardians. On top of that, there was a calamity 100 years prior because the previous grand water spirit, Undine, failed in her mission so Mokida has a lot to live up to.
I don't remember exactly what happened but Undine fell in love with one of her guardians, but learned after the mission was complete to revitalize the elements of the White World that she'd be forcibly returned to earth. Selfishly she did something to sabotage her mission which caused the calamity in an attempt to stay in the White World. Mokida would have had to track down and somehow retrieve the other part of her Spirit power which is still held by Undine which was why Mokida seemed so weak compared to the other Grand Spirits.
Aya Mokodia and Natsora Korkai where the Mirror and Lightning spirits respectively and would go on to be antagonists to Mokida but I don't remember why? I know both had perfectionist abusive parents and had trauma because of it but I don't remember much of the later half of the story...
These are bringing back some memories actually!
After Mokida is Isekai'd and meets up with Tori starting the story the first party member they ended up getting was a masked performer named "Shuffles the Clown". He had a real name but unless it's written on a doodle or something as I scan it is lost to time.
Shuffles was a somewhat chaotic but wise character and if it had been an anime with actual motion anytime his expression on his mask would change it would either need to be a hard cut or change with a motion of waving a hand in front of his face as he shuffles through masks, unwilling to show his face but still wanting to express emotion. I recall this element was inspired by the film "The King of Masks", which a friend had recently spent the night and brought with them to watch.
Otherwise I really don't remember how they recruited the performing clown.
Not long after he joined the party though he would suggest getting the help of a friend of his, Soshi Kumadori, to get them into some location they weren't supposed to go. They locate Soshi's traveling performance group and convince them to allow the gang to join them for a time, which the group agrees on the condition that the gang had to contribute as performers in some way. This was easy for Shuffles as he already was a performer which was how he knew the group, but the rest fumbled a lot.
I remember at least what was going on on this page!
This was the first time Mokida encountered Soshi, who was performing as the female lead of the play. Shuffles explains what is going on in the wordless performance, as it was the tale of a princess who met a tragic fate.
I literally only remember this because the Princess was supposed to have died by hanging, but in the play it would be portrayed by this flowy silk scarf as the princess character's 'ghost' was to still be able to sing and dance and perform and I had these visuals in my head of how it would look and they still look so clear to me!
Admittedly the group was supposed to be a Kabuki group but I didn't really know what Kabuki was, just that it was only performed by men so it was mostly like one of those all female theater groups but for men. And the whole performance group was basically transwomen, transvestites, and femboys.
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Okay, this is Soshi again from Open Element, as mentioned in my Jan 23rd post,
I don't have context for Soshi being in a school girl uniform but I know the color choice was directly inspired by how author Yuu Watase would often do art using just yellow and pink and red colors
(God I might add Soshi to a bin of characters to reuse in later stories because I feel like I owe this hot mess something...)
So for anyone that is just getting started with web site development, like myself, I am going to post my opinion on some software that I have used in my attempts to design my first fully functioning website. Today's software is Open Element.
What does it offer?
I chose to try it out because it had several positive qualities.
It was free to download
It focused on web design through "reusable style presets"
At first glance it's use appeared to be similar to Adobe's Dreamweaver software
More Features
I wanted software that would make learning web design as quick and comprehensive as possible. This is hard to do since learning to work with HTML, CSS, JQuery, etc. at a proficient level takes roughly two years. Open Element definitely made it easy to design websites!
Final Thoughts
However, for beginners it didn't explain the code being used behind the designs very well. While to a seasoned developer, Open Element might be a great tool, a beginner would be better off using a regular text editor for a while before starting to use web developing software. Simply because understanding the code behind everything is so imperative. Once you are comfortable working through CSS, HTML and all the other ones, it would be a good idea to move on to software like Open Element.
