The Villain's Journey Characters & Terrible Doodles (Patreon)

Since quitting the Census, I've been slowly making progress on writing my newest novel, which has the working title of The Villain's Journey.  I'm actually close to hitting 20,000 words, which is where I was on the first try I junked, but this one is much more coherent and has a stronger direction, so that's good!

The basic premise is that my main character, Samata "Sam" Chandy, has long nursed a crush on her best friend, Alyssa, who happens to be her small town's local superhero. However, there's no local supervillain for Alyssa to fight, leaving her depressed and aimless. So Sam decides to secretly become the supervillain Alyssa needs! But naturally, things start to get complicated...

I've been doing doodles of the characters off and on,so I thought, why not post them and give a quick synopsis of the characters to motivate myself to keep writing? I intend to neaten these doodles using tracing paper or something later, but that might be a while and I want to post about these character! so for now, my patrons get DOODLES: HORRIBLE ROUGH DRAFT EDITION and maybe I'll post some improved ones when I repost these profiles to tumblr in like a month or six months or something

Here's how I imagine my characters and brief synopses! I hope you enjoy. And please say something if you do, I need all the encouragement I can get as I try to continue writing this book...

My main character, Sam (full name: Samata Chandy)! She's a 22-year-old who works at her mom's animal shelter, which specializes in super-powered animals. One day, a mysterious fog-cat enters the shelters care- and then Sam finds out the cat is actually a former big-time supervillain. Said supervillain decides Sam is a worthy successor to her supervillain legacy and grants her a magic hoodie (sort of, it's more complicated than that) which allows Sam to take on the attributes of any animal she chooses. I doodled an idea of what this would look like in my work journal back at the census:

Sam's mentor went by 'Majoricalicus the Magnificent Mage' back in her glory days, thought the public just called her "the Mad Magician" much to her consternation. Sam just calls her "Maj." Here's a messy concept of what she used to look like before mysterious circumstances turned her into a cat:

Maj basically acts as Sam's mentor in evil. She's constantly encouraging Sam to be more villainous and Sam has to do her best to ignore her. I kind of think of her as a combo of Luna from Sailor Moon and the Scarab to Jaime Reyes' Blue Beetle. Though there's ALSO probably a dash of Nyanko-sensei from Natsume's Book of Friends thrown in there too.

About 15 years back, Maj had a intense rivalry with the town's beloved superhero, Sylph!

definitely need to trace over and tweak this one, the bottom part was so bad I just cut it off, haha.

Sylph had wind based powers and was considered to be the hero that gave Sam's small town life. She was the town's only claim to fame, and since she vanished (along with Maj) a whole back, the town hasn't been the same.

Which is why  Sam's bff, Alyssa, has been doing her best as Sylph's successor! But, as mentioned in the premise, she's been pretty depressed without a villain to fight and not receiving too much enthusiasm from the town she's trying to revitalize. It doesn't help that she's not very graceful compared to her idol, and doesn't have much control over her own wind powers.

Yeah I really need to fix the neck on the right, eesh. Alyssa's superhero name (for now) is 'Whirlwind'.  She has a close connection to the vanished Sylph and a lot of family issues (her little sister, Kelsey, is a villain stan).  And though at first having a supervillain to tussle with excites her, later on things start getting complicated.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this peek into my process! Sorry for the bad drawings, any encouragement or thoughts are appreciated, hopefully I'll force myself to do some better drawings someday, etc etc!