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Aaronwing on April 12, 2011

If you're wondering, Chibi-Sam is 5 years old (I think) and a girl.

I don't know why I introduced her like this. In fact, those author boxes should be square and in a different font. Though because I personally lettered them by hand that would have been hard, I did all the dialogue myself, can't remember why. Either I insisted on it or Emily didn't want to. Also the story telling here is really simple, and I think is what actually set the stage as this being a children's comic, considering I was making it all up as I went, literally.

As for the story, it's actually based on myself. I grew up where there was a set of railroad tracks directly behind my house, where a train ran about once every day or so, and I played on the tracks a lot as a kid. So since I had to do a kiddie comic since the artist could only draw chibi's. (I didn't know about comedic, or violent ways to use chibi's at the time, as I said I had just started reading manga) I decided to base it on my childhood. And what adventurous thing had I always wanted to do as a kid? Follow the train tracks of course! But I never did. So Sam is doing it for me.

On thing about the last panel here though, the train tracks behind my house had been removed for various reasons years before I wrote this comic, and this line about property value was something my parents had actual said at one time, so it stuck with me. Though my parents didn't like it very much when they read this comic to see it included. LOL

Last thing is about the art, I guess. If you look at the original it's all shaded in pencil (It's all we had and we were running out of time) So you can't really see it copied, or scanned, but i did what I though was a cool shade by tracing it on crumpled paper. I wanna figure how to do this in an editor program one day.

As for the train we see one of my few artistic contributions to the comic. The train. For my talents at the time, it's actually pretty good. *Chuckle* I can't remember if Emily didn't want to do it, or I insisted on doing it again. I think it was the first one, because I remember she hated backgrounds, she preferred to do characters.