The Bygone Bureau recently published part-one-of-eventually-four of my comic, Manic Pixel Dream Girl. I’ve been thinking about writing something about growing up as a girl who played videogames for awhile now (like four or five years), so when I finally decided to get to work, it took me a long time to distill all my ideas down to something that made sense and that I was happy with. As a result, there are A LOT of different drafts & versions of MPDG1.

Here’s the first version, which I did around Thanksgiving:

Those panels (though they weren’t such defined “panels” in the final comic) actually stayed pretty similar, though I did end up making the “imaginary museum of ladies in gaming currently” into something more like a gallery on a staircase so there would be some feeling of movement, which I think is important for the medium (of internet comic). I owe a lot to the Bygone Bureau’s Hallie Bateman for exemplifying that internet-comic-vertical-movement idea in her work. Her Cemetery Wonderland is something I look at CONSTANTLY when I’m drawing comics.

Anyway! Next page:

These, on the other hand, were way more nebulous and took a lot longer to solidify in my head, and also on paper. I especially had a REALLY hard time figuring out how to convey the childhood lunacy that caused me to lie to myself in my own diaries. I worked through probably like five versions of that “scene” in my life before it clicked for me. And I’m happy with how it turned out.

I was going to post MORE of my process sketches for MPDG in this post, but I didn’t want to overwhelm y’all this early on! I will follow this up with other versions & drafts.