This week's blog is going to need some backstory. So here goes:
A while ago, I was discussing Sonichu, and more specifically the guy redrawing it, with a friend of mine. If you're not familiar with Sonichu, I'll sum up: It's patently terrible in every way, the creator is about twenty-seven kinds of screwed up, and if you want to know more, you're going to have to find out for yourself, which I don't recommend. The project in question is a scheme to thoroughly wind up the original creator by redrawing the comic with much better artwork (bearing in mind that said original creator firmly believes that he's a professional-grade artist, and not someone who expends vast effort to create something that looks like it was done by an apathetic five-year-old).
It was somewhere in this discussion that I mentioned that a comic called Cheshire Crossing might benefit from a similar project, as like Sonichu, the art was incredibly bad (although not nearly so bad as Sonichu's), but unlike Sonichu, the writing was actually worth salvaging; to which she replied, "Great idea, get on it." I was making an idle remark at the time, but once she made the remark I realized that, by my own undemanding standards, and apparently by her rather more demanding standards, I did qualify on this one.
Cheshire Crossing's premise is that, after their respective adventures in their respective Notherevilles, Alice Liddell, Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling were bounced around various mental institutions as their various loved ones tried to dissuade them of the notion that they'd travelled to these other worlds. Now, as grown women, they end up at "Cheshire Crossing", an institution pretty much like all the others, except that they believe the girls. Their goal is to teach them to use their world-hopping powers, presumably to put them to work using them later. The ART, meanwhile, combines the least desirable qualities of anime and Kim Possible, and the artist works from templates, so all the characters look the same, bar hairstyle and outfit.
Which brings me, at long last, to this week's sketches. There are a number of reasons why I haven't undertaken this project yet, but the two main ones are A) that I don't have the time right now, what with college, and B) because this is about improving a story worth salvaging rather than getting the creator's goat, I'm not going to do it at all without the creator's blessing, and I haven't spoken to him about it yet (and I'm not going to for a good while yet). But I did recently get to thinking about the idea some more, so this week's sketches are possible designs for the three girls should the project eventually happen.
Dorothy is physically the biggest girl-she's often portrayed as a dainty, pretty little thing, which we can probably thank Judy Garland for, but as Gregory Maguire briefly noted in Wicked, Dorothy is a farmgirl who grew up on a farm and probably did a lot of farmy sort of chores, on this farm of her aunt and uncle's (this is already far more time than Maguire gave the matter). Thusly, you're likely to get a woman with some beef on her. Dorothy is the most chipper and well-adjusted of the three girls; she's more inclined to cooperate than Alice and less restless than Wendy.
Alice, by contrast, is the smallest girl. Although her role in her original story is largely the same as Dorothy (wander around a strange land, say "golly, that's unusual" whenever she sees something unfamiliar, and ask the locals if they know what's going on), she lacks Dorothy's farm upbringing, in favor of a slightly less exhausting upper-class life. She's also the most bitter about the asylum runabout she's been getting all her life; hence the permanent scowl and tendency to behave rebelliously for no apparent reason. She gives off the suggestion that she thinks she's been brought up to be a proper English lady and that may well be the case, but she's too angry and headstrong to pull it off. I've seen it in real life as well as fiction-smaller people seem more likely to be the really angry ones. I wonder why that is. I wonder who wrote the book of love.
Wendy is sort of a middle ground, both in terms of personality and size. Wendy is the only girl who actually has any idea how to fight-Dorothy and Alice rely on guile and cunning during action sequences, whereas Wendy carries a sword and has at least SOME idea how to use it, and a wiry fencer's build to go with. She's not happy about her parents not believing her and her brothers, but unlike Alice she understands that you can't really win by refusing to play the game.
