Moonlit Spiral: Zyla Fable

Continuing writing a bit about the characters for Moonlit Spiral as well as some process on them. Today I'm spotlighting the primary supporting character and second most paneled person in the book!

Zyla (pronounced Zigh-lah) was a tough character to peg down in terms of design. I knew fairly early on what her personality would to be like. As Rion's best friend I needed to challenge his thinking in a lot of ways which meant conflicting the more systematic view of his world with alternate outlooks. So adventurous, open-minded, free-hearted, a little fiery, etc...

Here's how I described her in my pitch proposal:

In a lot of ways Zyla is the polar opposite of Rion: Optimistic, tough and intrepid. Although those qualities sometimes make her think she is more adept at taking on difficult challenges than she actually is.

She is also the only person in Dahl who thinks she can “talk” to Blume Snails—the shelled gastropods which help power the region of Helix. Zyla believes their bioluminescence is linked to a psionic ability to sense emotions and that she can harness this empathy to communicate with them (even if most of her friends think she is absolutely nuts).

Oh hey! Look at that. Something about the snails. More on them eventually...

Anyhoo, here are some of the earliest looks I tried coming up with for Zyla, before I even had a proper name for her:

Even looking at these again, I still really like #3 up there. I like all of these actually, and maybe some of these designs will show up in a different book someday. However, none of them really felt like a good fit next to Rion until #4. For one, I needed someone closer to his height and build purely for dumb compositional reasons.

Here's a few further sketches exploring that fourth look I circled up there, still trying to nail down a name. For the life of me, I can't recall what I was thinking with the roman numeral name XIL.

I felt like I was getting pretty close with the one I starred, so I explored that look a little more until I got pretty close to how she is in the book. I also finally landed on her name (no meaning behind it, I just liked the way it looked/sounded).

I kept playing with her hair. I loved the idea of her cutting it right before her and Rion's adventure really takes off, but I just couldn't work an explanation of it into the pacing. So now it's short all the way through. A little longer and messier than it is in these sketches too.

Here's a couple of test panels I drew last week that show how she currently looks:

My original thought is that she would be half-asian (I have quite a bit of family who are and thought that'd be nice) but she is looking pretty 100% Caucasian in those sample panels and almost every other time I've drawn her. A little older than thirteen too. So now I have to decide if I want to go and redo all the times I've drawn her, or just accept this is ultimately who she wants to be and leave it at that.

I'm slightly disappointed in myself for creating yet another female, red-headed character (especially an idealistic one) but she really is who I saw in my minds-eye while I was writing her sequences. Maybe red-headed characters will just be a constant in all of my stories. Like cats. :)

Next: Quill! (my favorite character)

💜