Meet "Plague Rat" :: Designing a protagonist
A brief story with sketches and screenshots
We call the hero of Swán “Plague Rat.” Sock that away so the rest of this post makes sense.
In February 2023, Isabela (
) askedSo I want to do some character design for plague rat so we can have a little character sheet. Could send me more info about him and the world around him? Anything can be useful so don’t be afraid of writing too much!
Little did she know.
We had just started page one, and at the time Plague Rat was somewhere between menacing murderbot and downright adorable.
My writing tends to be light on character details. Whether it’s the description of characters in
or here in Swán. I actually thought I did pretty well, but it wasn’t quite enough.
The lore I sank into the thread we’ll save for a later post — please subscribe — but I basically painted a picture of a capable travelling urchin in a medieval analogue that is, say, equivalent to northern Europe in the 700s.
We had to choose the right hair.
Then, Isabela asked —
Okay so I did a little bit of exploration with plague rat, does he carries anything with him? like a bag or a walking stick?
and I wrote:
I think he’s been on the road for a minute, we want him to be competent enough. So he probably carries a bag / pack. Legit kind of love the idea of a walking stick because, idk, picking up a cool stick is such a kid thing.
Think about all the stuff you daydreamed about as a kid. I grew up in a rural area so I totally wandered around, picked up sticks, I carried like old loaves of bread because I wanted crow friends and to feed ducks and stuff.
And she said:
I think maybe he would try to cut his own hair because it bothers him but the hair will be super asymmetrical and kinda funny. You know when you're a kid and you have that brilliant idea of cutting your own hair?
This was fun, and I discovered not for the first time and certainly not the last that this process was fundamentally co-creative. I fancy myself a writer who tries to adhere to a kind of realism, if anything because it makes the fantasy more extraordinary, and I am sure I would have written a kid who looks like a kid of the times, but I’m not certain these decisions wouldn’t have been copied from some documentary instead of rationalized and given the backstory we’d just imagined.
Plague Rat is a kid who’s been on his own for some time. He is, even if we wish the circumstances were different, capable. What he wears, how he navigates the world is practical enough to have earned his survival - but he’s still a kid.
Of course he’d find a good stick.
On February 11th, 2023, Isabela wrote: “Okay I think we got our protagonist!”
Join Isabela and me over the next year as we usher our first comic to a successful launch. We’re going to share with you what we’ve learned, what we’re learning, our gaffes, and our a-ha moments. I think you’ll find this interesting.
Your pal,
Michael