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Raven's Children - History - the early Raven Tribe
I'm going to start posting the annotated Raven's Children on Friday. In the meantime, I'll lead up to that with a series of information posts on the background of the series. These are entirely skippable, although they will be helpful when I get around to talking about certain aspects of the comic in the page-by-page commentary. The idea is to organize all my backstory information into manageable chunks, rather than dumping 4000 words of it on you when it becomes relevant.
I realize that this is slightly backwards, because most of you aren't even going to be interested in any of this until I provide context for it (in the form of pages). *apologetic grin* But there's no way I can do this that isn't going to involve infodumping on you at some point. And pulling all of this together has turned out to be very useful for me in getting my thoughts in order before I start posting.
This week's posting schedule:
Monday (today): the history of the Raven Tribe
Tuesday: Fivemoon
Wednesday: putting them together
Thursday: cultural appropriation and borrowing (definitions, etc)
Friday: first RC page
The finished version of Raven's Children is the final combined form of two different projects I worked on in my teens, one of which was the Raven Tribe project (it didn't really have a title) and the other was Fivemoon (which I'll get to tomorrow). I was about 13 when I started working on them both, sometime around 1990.
The initial Raven Tribe project was one of a number of similar stories that I worked on in the late '80s. I was very heavily influenced by Elfquest and The Clan of the Cave Bear books, and I was also largely bedridden during this time due to health issues, so I had nothing to do but write and draw. So I did - I whiled away the hours coming up with low-tech, tribal societies, generally set in non-magical fantasy worlds, and then writing or drawing stories about them. The fun part was coming up with the huge cast of characters in the first place. I could happily spend day after day building family trees, designing a unique outfit and hairstyle for each of the dozens of characters and so forth.
In addition to the above influences, the Raven Tribe were also partly influenced/inspired by an extremely obscure black-and-white comic set on the Silk Road called Spirit of the Wind. There was only one issue ever published, but I happened to stumble upon it at the height of my Clan of the Cave Bear obsession and right as I was getting interested in history in a major way, and I read it so many times that I can still recall specific pages. Because that was on my mind at the time, RC was always intended to take place in a sort of fantasy version of central Asia, where the steppes met the mountains.
The transplantation to an Arctic setting happened at the very last minute, when I completely reworked the series in 2000-2001, and some of the problems I later had with the series were because of this eleventh-hour transmutation of setting.
I have no idea if the following is of interest to anyone but me, but these pages from one of my notebooks, circa 1990 or so, are the first-ever notes for what would eventually become Raven's Children.
(I assume the list of hair types and skin colors at the bottom were meant to give myself options when I figured out what they looked like.)
These notes give a fairly accurate glimpse of my workflow at the time -- invent a million characters, most of them related to each other, then (later) make up a story for them. *g*
Many of these characters later appeared in Raven's Children, but under different names and sometimes with different relationships -- for example, Coren's father-in-law Kelec evolved into his brother Kafal (but still remained fundamentally the same character).
During the next few years, the cast evolved quite a bit, and went through a number of changes of milieu and storyline, although the most common version was that they were horse-riding nomads in either the steppe or the desert. Slowly, one piece at a time, the cast and general storyline organized itself into the main plot of Raven's Children.
The part of RC that was finished -- the first story arc -- is actually the prologue to what was originally supposed to be the main story, which involved the tribe leaving their homeland and traveling across their continent. There would have been roughly a 13-year time-jump between the end of the first arc and the beginning of the second, and the main characters in the finished part of RC are actually, for the most part, the parents of the main characters in the main body of the story. This never had a chance to materialize in the part of the story that I finished, which perhaps is just as well.
Tomorrow: Fivemoon!
I realize that this is slightly backwards, because most of you aren't even going to be interested in any of this until I provide context for it (in the form of pages). *apologetic grin* But there's no way I can do this that isn't going to involve infodumping on you at some point. And pulling all of this together has turned out to be very useful for me in getting my thoughts in order before I start posting.
This week's posting schedule:
Monday (today): the history of the Raven Tribe
Tuesday: Fivemoon
Wednesday: putting them together
Thursday: cultural appropriation and borrowing (definitions, etc)
Friday: first RC page
The finished version of Raven's Children is the final combined form of two different projects I worked on in my teens, one of which was the Raven Tribe project (it didn't really have a title) and the other was Fivemoon (which I'll get to tomorrow). I was about 13 when I started working on them both, sometime around 1990.
The initial Raven Tribe project was one of a number of similar stories that I worked on in the late '80s. I was very heavily influenced by Elfquest and The Clan of the Cave Bear books, and I was also largely bedridden during this time due to health issues, so I had nothing to do but write and draw. So I did - I whiled away the hours coming up with low-tech, tribal societies, generally set in non-magical fantasy worlds, and then writing or drawing stories about them. The fun part was coming up with the huge cast of characters in the first place. I could happily spend day after day building family trees, designing a unique outfit and hairstyle for each of the dozens of characters and so forth.
In addition to the above influences, the Raven Tribe were also partly influenced/inspired by an extremely obscure black-and-white comic set on the Silk Road called Spirit of the Wind. There was only one issue ever published, but I happened to stumble upon it at the height of my Clan of the Cave Bear obsession and right as I was getting interested in history in a major way, and I read it so many times that I can still recall specific pages. Because that was on my mind at the time, RC was always intended to take place in a sort of fantasy version of central Asia, where the steppes met the mountains.
The transplantation to an Arctic setting happened at the very last minute, when I completely reworked the series in 2000-2001, and some of the problems I later had with the series were because of this eleventh-hour transmutation of setting.
I have no idea if the following is of interest to anyone but me, but these pages from one of my notebooks, circa 1990 or so, are the first-ever notes for what would eventually become Raven's Children.
(I assume the list of hair types and skin colors at the bottom were meant to give myself options when I figured out what they looked like.)
These notes give a fairly accurate glimpse of my workflow at the time -- invent a million characters, most of them related to each other, then (later) make up a story for them. *g*
Many of these characters later appeared in Raven's Children, but under different names and sometimes with different relationships -- for example, Coren's father-in-law Kelec evolved into his brother Kafal (but still remained fundamentally the same character).
During the next few years, the cast evolved quite a bit, and went through a number of changes of milieu and storyline, although the most common version was that they were horse-riding nomads in either the steppe or the desert. Slowly, one piece at a time, the cast and general storyline organized itself into the main plot of Raven's Children.
The part of RC that was finished -- the first story arc -- is actually the prologue to what was originally supposed to be the main story, which involved the tribe leaving their homeland and traveling across their continent. There would have been roughly a 13-year time-jump between the end of the first arc and the beginning of the second, and the main characters in the finished part of RC are actually, for the most part, the parents of the main characters in the main body of the story. This never had a chance to materialize in the part of the story that I finished, which perhaps is just as well.
Tomorrow: Fivemoon!