Outlaws of Phalysium Behind the Scenes part 2

So as I promised with the first behind the scenes, this one is all about the origin of The Wanderer. I'm going to try to be as thorough as possible. The Wanderer is a notion which started back in 2014 with a few sketches and an itch to tell stories.

2010

Okay, I lied. It starts in 2010 with a little prehistory. I was kicking around a concept called Wandy Ate Goblins (a play on '1d8 Goblins,' a D&D parlance). It was a story about a little girl who happened to eat a goblin. In this world, goblins were little nasty guys that were kind of immortal. Whenever they die, a tiny goblin would pop out of their mouth and run away. The little girl in this case caught one and ate it as a toddler. This imbued her with strange magic powers. I was reading a lot of indie fantasy comics like Orc Stain and Hellboy back then. I knew I had something there, but I wasn't sure what yet. So I kept the concept on the backburner and kept on livin'.

2014

I was in college at the time and I wasn't yet accepted into my program, so I had plenty of time on my hands. I was really interested in cowboy fiction, but I didn't have a truly strong idea yet. Either way that grizzled cowboy sketch turned into a sketch of Wandy, the girl from Wandy Ate Goblins. I finally had a heading for this story... And then I got super busy with my classes, so the project was put on the backburner.

2015

My first real crack at the story. This version of the story was about family, set in a fantasy western hybrid that involved a bit of magitech inspired by the old west. I sort of split Wandy into two characters, an older and younger sister. The pair were traveling to a magical city to get the little sister's mystic eyes fixed. Eventually I lost steam on this version of the story and put it to bed for another year.

2016

I took an illustration class which challenged us to make one comic over the semester. I was cocky and untested, so I took the challenge. I managed to make about two pages over the semester because as it turns out making comics for real is pretty freakin' difficult. By this point the story had mutated to be a fantasy story about a traveling storyteller named Wandy who had magic eye powers. She could see the spirit world and her eyes would shine when she learned something new. I passed that illustration class, but I was truly humbled by my experience there. I knew if I wanted to make comics, I had to get serious.

2017

I graduated in 2017 and suddenly my schedule opened way up. I was working as an Ad Appraiser for a company that contracted to Google. My job was to sit for a few hours a day watching how various ads would express on youtube videos and websites. It was drudgery, but this was before the Adpocalypse so the work was plentiful. Anyways I was drawing a ton back then. Just sketches upon sketches of this Wandy character. And then one day I hit on a design which sent a jolt through my brain. I was playing with bringing back the poncho from the original cowboy doodle and I wanted to try and design a character with no face that could still emote. I was inspired by characters like The Maxx, Judge Dredd, and Hellboy, whose range of expression are limited by the reduction of their facial features (Hellboy has no pupils and rarely emotes, but Mignola manages to make him expressive anyways.) I knew that I had hit on a good silhouette. My story was also getting twisted by the Maxx. A dreamworld warrior concept got into the mix somehow. I was simply sketching at this stage. No big plans for an actual story yet. Some icons from previous versions had survived and the concept was starting to coagulate. I knew I wanted the story to be about freedom and self-discovery. The goblin aspect was less interesting to me at this point.

2018 and 2019

I got super busy in 2018, so drawing almost completely stopped for me that year. But 2019 I managed to save enough scratch to get a refurbished ipad pro and apple pencil. I was back in a big way. That year for inktober I challenged myself to draw one comic page a day to make the comic of my dreams!! I lasted 9 days and then realized after all my preparation and design work, I didn't really have a story. I had a concept and a cool design aka nothing.

Still, the drawing was good and I learned a lot from making these 9 pages. Honestly there's a few panels in here I feel like I can learn from even now. In this version of the story, the fantasy planet had become a planet of animal people and humans. The animal people were an underclass, former slaves who had fought for their independence through civil action. Subtle and not all fucked up, right? Wandy would be a monster hunter in this world, fighting all kinds of weird beasts that didn't quite make the cut of personhood. Anyway, the reveal at the end of the story was going to be that this was a human space colony which had lost contact with Earth thousands of years ago and the animal people were actually uplifted animals created to be slaves in the first place. Not a great reveal, but an interesting premise. As my latest foray into comics, Wander was he best example of my capabilities as an illustrator. Soon I would start the next leg of my career, which also put Wandy and their adventures back on the shelf.

2020

Ah, 2020. What a year, huh? I turned 30 that year and I was still working at a Target and going nowhere fast. On 12/26/20 Boxing Day, I quit that awful place and decided to focus on making NSFW art for a career. I just needed to know if I could do it. I had been into TG stuff since I was a teen, after all. That experiment is still ongoing three and a half years later, but the important part is that work on Wander all but dried up. It still sat on my iPad as a reminder of what I could achieve.

2021

One page of Wandy drawings, just to loosen up my hand. I still loved the design. Work was starting to take off in the NSFW space so I just forged ahead.

Even then I had Wandy on the brain.

2023

In 2022 I finally hit my stride with making comics and people liking them, so I really just focused on that. But in 2023, Grumpy-TG suggested an interesting concept to me. We had just done a series of collabs and Grumpy was working on a new setting: The Phalysium Chronicles. We started talking about what this world would be like and we developed it into a pretty awesome premise that I think we're going to be exploring for the next few years (knock on wood). I realized that Phalysium was growing closer and closer to my Wander setting. If this really was going to be a serious scifi TG setting with elements of colonialism and self-identification, I knew I could make Wandy fit. It made a lot of sense. So all of a sudden Wandy became the Wanderer, dropped the magic eyes, and Wander became a possible ongoing series. But I had too much work on my plate in 2023 to dive in just yet.

Alt cover for the first Phalysium book by Grumpy-TG (very Goosebumps, I'm realizing now)

2024

And that brings us to the present. Wandy, now the Wanderer was the main character in my own branch of the Phalysium canon. I drew them a few more times in preparation for starting the book. By this point, avid readers know that the Wanderer has some genetic connection to the captain of the Woahmen ship. That is an angle which I aim to explore in future stories.

 And that brings you up to speed on the origins of The Wanderer and how they got to Phalysium! All in all, I'm very happy with how this character finally got out there. I think this is the best version of the concept. Thank you for reading. I hope this was interesting.