Prenna

Author notes

Prenna #1 - Shining Through: Page 1

rainingbells

on July 14, 2007

In 1997 I started my site, stormchild.com, with a comic entitled "Prenna". It was an experiment on a number of levels, as I seriously started teaching myself to draw comics, and moved away from the somewhat realistic style I was using in one-off character sketches as a writer.

Prenna itself was the story of an ancient living starship being passed to two modern day human siblings named Gabriel and Eve, and because of that they, along with Earth's population, suddenly find themselves thrust into galactic society. A couple of you who have surfed around long enough may remember Prenna, though most of you likely will not. It's how I met my oldest friend, Anthony, who started out as a fan of the original.

But by around 1999 I was pushing artistic burnout. Honestly, I do the writing thing. I never wanted to do art, but I couldn't find dependable artists on any of my previous projects so I taught myself to do the art because I wanted my stories told visually.

As a writer, though, you can crank out a story in a couple of days that as an artist it takes you a month or more to draw; it's very frustrating when you feel like your story is progressing so slowly it may as well not be moving. So there was burnout. I mean, crazy as it sounds, I was actually getting nauseous every time I even thought about drawing a page. As a result, I didn't really draw for a couple of years after that. Far as I was concerned, I was done.

But then a variety of heavy things happened in my life one after another for almost two years. The accidental OD of one acquaintance, being effectively homeless and sleeping on sidewalks, almost getting run down by one friend who flipped out, and cut up by this other guy who I'm fairly certain was trying to kill me, a bad car accident that put me in physical therapy…there was a lot of shit. I was in a rather dark place, progressively darker, because in various instances "they" talk about hitting bottom in life, but you know, there is no bottom beyond being dead yourself. It can always get worse. You can lose everything, and you can still drop further down. But that dark place was one where I came back around to look at the production of art as a little more of a cathartic experience as opposed to a complete burden.

That's when I created one of my other comics, Sune. Both the art and the story there were and still are part of my release.

But I never forgot about Prenna and the characters there; it has science fiction, superhero, and slice of life elements. Hell, the sort of unofficial mascot for my site, the lizardgirl with the hematite-like skin, Maggie, was one of the characters.

So it's the ten year anniversary of both Stormchild and the comic launched with it; seems like now is the perfect time to bring back Prenna, if only in short stories here and there (as opposed to the epic that Sune has become).

This time we'll start a little bit before Gabriel and Eve.

Enjoy.

Page colored by Savark Dicupe