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Prologue - Page 7: Suzannah and Johnny - by kenisu3000

kenisu - #07
Here, we get to meet three of my original characters: George and Maria's son, Johnny (I guess if I had to give him an age, I'd say about five), Maria's sister Suzannah, and James, who was mentioned on Page 3.
I knew that since George and Maria had a legacy that HAD to have been laid down BEFORE the abduction, then they must have had a child that had been perhaps overlooked in the kidnapping. To emphasize this, I gave them a son, designed him the way I draw Ninten (just with brown hair and newsie-style clothes), and I made it so that during the abduction, he had been out visiting his aunt Suzannah. Also, note the continued use of British dialect: Johnny refers to his mother as "mum".
At first I wanted the next page after the George-and-Maria scream and the shattering-of-the-eyeglasses to be where Suzannah brings Johnny home, to find the house completely abandoned. Instead, I realized there would need to be some more introduction to these characters, and maybe some interaction with others before they discovered the awful truth. That's how James became more than just a fleeting mention made by George. So, I threw in some more character establishment, and the "Big Discovery" was shifted to Page 8.
I made James to resemble the typical old farmer, jaded by the "young whipper-snappers these days", and I gave him a corn field. Corn fields are great if you want to write something scary. Also, there's a little nuance which I don't think was made clear enough: James' home is the 1906 equivalent of the house in 1988 of the fat guy who says his house was torn apart by a poltergeist.

Author	Title	Description	Date	Rank
kenisu3000	"Whose Hat is This?" coloring book, pg. 15 (end)	whohat - #09 Okay, so I had only been given a maximum of 16 pages to illustrate this book, and with the title page, that meant that page 15 was it. Corny lines ("they were happy; they had made a new friend") aside, it really does close things out a little too quickly to say "after Anna gave her father the medicine..." The famous author Mark Twain once said, "Don't just SAY the woman screamed: bring her out and let her scream!" This means that it's best to draw things out in the story so that it feels more natural, but here I had run out of pages, and had set up a plot exposition that was never to be shown. As a result, we never get to see Anna's father (not here, anyway; we'll see him in my comic series though).	9/25/06	0.00
kenisu3000	"Whose Hat is This?" coloring book, pgs. 1 & 2	whohat - #02 I've found that in the Mother 1/EB Zero universe, there's two types of fans: those who refer to the lead character as "Ninten", and those who call him "Ken" (after Saori Kumi's Mother novel). I'm of the former crowd, but in this particular instance I decided to go with "Ken", since it would be just plain weird for a bunch of kids who don't understand the game to be reading about someone whose name is strikingly close to "Nintendo". All the same, it was awfully weird for ME to write the story, since Ken is just a shortened version of my OWN name (Kenneth), which I generally don't like to be called. But anyway, check out Page 2. Since the Paradise Line only has about what, six or seven destinations TOTAL, that's gotta be one tiny catalogue. Either that or they dedicated a whole page to each individual town.	9/25/06	8.00
kenisu3000	"Whose Hat is This?" coloring book, pgs. 11 & 12	whohat - #07 So why aren't Ninten and Lloyd all decked out in warm clothing? That's the beauty of cartoons - it doesn't have to make sense. Page 12 has to be my absolute favorite :) It's all about the disgusting sneezing. Of course, I was pulling a wink at the game again, where you have to be careful who you talk to in Snowman, or they just might cough all over you and give you a cold. So originally I was going to make it a cough, but I decided sneezing would be infinitely funnier.	9/25/06	0.00
kenisu3000	"Whose Hat is This?" coloring book, pgs. 13-14	whohat - #08 I knew I was approaching the end of the book, and I was a little behind on schedule, so I wanted to rush things a bit. Instead of the pair walking all the way deeper into Snowman to get to the church where Anna resides with her father (where I was playing with the idea of having Anna heal Lloyd using her psychic powers, but I decided against that since some of the parents of the children coloring this book might be the paranoid "witch-hunter" type), I put Anna right there in town at the store, having conveniently just bought some medicine herself. And she gives some to Lloyd, who then, simply put, feels better. I know that's a laughably bad cop-out from having to say "two weeks and several periodic doses later he felt better", but that's just how I do things. On another note, I was so proud of myself for the way I drew Anna's face on Page 13, because it was so professional-looking and just so... symmetrical! but when I inked it in using my big oaf pen, since she's standing in the distance and the lines on her face are smaller, the overuse of ink kinda messed it up. I've since learned to use smaller-tipped pens for inking.	9/25/06	9.00
kenisu3000	"Whose Hat is This?" coloring book, pgs. 3 & 4	whohat - #03 I love putting little nuances and inside jokes into my art. Here, on page 3, the bench the two boys are sitting on has an advertisement for Mach Pizza ("We deliver, and that's all!"). Of course, if you want to nitpick, that's a reference to Mother 2, but... hey, Mother is Mother. Also, notice how quick Ke- err, Ninten is to agree to go to Snowman. I bet he's a good little boy who helps old ladies like her across the street. He's really got that "stand-up leadership" thing going for him.	9/25/06	0.00