Daisy Chains
Action!
Starting is the hardest part. That's what I hear from kids, and sometimes it's true for me too.
But starting can be hard in different ways. Some people hold their pencil tight in their hands and think really, really hard about the first words they put down. Some people stare at their computer screens for a long time, then go play games for a while. Some people stare into space and wait for a good idea to come to them.
Here is what I do. With Daisy Dreamer, I already know what the story is by the time I sit down to write. I've talked over the story idea with Mary, the editor of
Chickadee, and she's talked about it with the other people on the
Chickadee team. We all know the story before it's been written.
The best stories are the ones where there is lots of action, and the action starts right away. Even though I know that, sometimes when I start to write the comic I take too long to start the action. Then suddenly I go, "Oh no! I've written 8 panels and there's no action yet!" Then I have to go back and delete some of the stuff I wrote already.
The best example I can think of is a story that had to do with mothers. It ran years ago -- maybe May 2002 or 2003. When I first wrote it, it started off with Daisy and Annie walking down the street together. They were talking about how they were happy they were friends, and how in the beginning Daisy didn't think Annie would like her. I looked at this story and I thought "Boring!". Fortunately, that version never appeared in
Chickadee (they never would have allowed it into the magazine!). Instead, it starts off with Daisy and Annie finding a bird's nest. Then Daisy turns into a sandpiper and lures away a cat who is threatening the babies in the nest.
Much better.
Summer fun
The summer issue of Chickadee is out, and Daisy Dreamer looks great on the cover, along with her pals Ravi and Annie. Great job!
Re-reading this story (and seeing it with the artwork for the first time) I realized that the summer 2006 is one of my favourite Daisy stories so far. The kids camp on an island, where they meet a spooky pirate ghost and head off on a treasure hunt.
One thing I found interesting about this story is that it seemed so exciting and action-packed that I forgot that Daisy was actually going to turn into an animal (and I wrote it!). When I got to the panel where she twists her cap and turns into an animal I thought, "Oh right... the animal."
The rest of the issue is full of all kinds of great pirate stuff too. Pick it up at a magazine store, or check it out at your local library.
Mistakes
I recently wrote that I thought we had occasionally made mistakes with Daisy Dreamer. (When I say we, I guess I mostly mean me), so I thought it would be fun to post once in a while about what those mistakes were. Here's one of them.
Several years back, Chickadee had an issue all about space. I somehow thought I would write a big, sweeping story for Daisy. I'm not sure what I was thinking. I had probably misunderstood Hilary, who was the editor then, and thought I had more pages to work with. In the end, we came up with an idea that had Daisy going up to the space station -- the first kid in space! (I, of course, wrote way too much and then had to cut, cut, cut lots of panels.)
Well, Gabriel Morrissette later told me he'd been surprised by that. He said he always saw Daisy as a regular kid, but with this one special magical power -- the power to turn into any animal in the world, when she twists her ballcap on her head. Putting Daisy in space made her something more than just a normal kid. She was world-famous.
I realized Gabriel was right. It was fun to write the space story, but it was a bit odd to set Daisy apart from other kids. I think one of the reasons people like her is that she really is a regular kid -- most of the time. So she's not going to be zooming down to the ocean floor or into space again anytime soon.
How much can you push it?
One of the options I had to consider in the last Daisy Dreamer story was having Daisy transform into another person instead of an animal.
When you write a comic that is only two pages, and that features the same characters (or mostly the same characters) every month, you can't make too many changes. But, at the same time, things do have to change or the comic becomes boring.
The trick is knowing how much change is OK. Sometimes I think we've made mistakes. If you break the basic rules of the comic then anything is possible. That might sound like a good thing, but really it isn't. What would happen if Spiderman suddenly had X-ray vision for a series? Or if Batman developed super-powers and lost his fortune? Spiderman wouldn't be Spiderman anymore, and Batman wouldn't be Batman anymore.
The same thing is true for Daisy also. Her special power is turning into animals. We can cheat a little bit and have her, for example, turn into an animal statue (like she did in Egypt, when she became the statue of an Egyptian cat goddess) . But whatever she transforms into has to have something to do with animals. Becoming another person would be too strange.
Daisy Dreamer in...?
Daisy Dreamer is going off on one of her coolest adventures ever, in a far-away part of the world, where she will meet somebody
very unusual, but also familiar. It will be so great. Now all I have to do is finish writing it.