If you’re here you’ve probably read the post I made about my childhood/teenage comic project I had with a friend of mine. In 2012, I drew an epilogue for this story, because I had finally accepted that it wasn’t going to continue, and I wanted to wrap things up. In some ways, the epilogue is a commentary on the comic itself, so you may need a bit of context to understand it. The epilogue works under the premise of Murphy’s Law, (whatever can go wrong, will go wrong,) because in the original Four Colours, everything that can go the main characters’ way, will. I guess at some point we all reach an age where we want to be extra critical about our younger self’s idealism, and only after we’ve done the opposite of what we used to do, we can start writing more balanced stories? Well, maybe not everyone goes through that, but I clearly had a bone to pick with myself when I drew this little epilogue. It will also include a lot of confusing stuff and inside jokes, so I’m here to guide you through it.
Enter Viola. This story is told from her point of view, so you should only take it as her opinion about what happened. Viola remains one of my favourite characters to write about. She’s very immature and ignorant, but there’s something compelling about writing that from her perspective.
Viola has been known for her short hair throughout the old comic.
While Keller has been known for her long hair.
Six years means, that Viola last saw Keller in high school, and has now been studying at a university for a few years.
Viola, Keller, Jasmin and Sini (the Four Colours) and their friends Alex and Roni are having a band practice. (Roni is a common Finnish guy’s name.)
It’s a weird page. It’s a bit hard to read, Alex’s comment (the one with the head in it) isn’t placed in a way that it would naturally read after Jasmin’s comment about him. Also, I’m pretty sure Jasmin meant to say that Viola keeps “messing up” her part.
MoonStar was Keller & Viola’s duo, which they formed after winning a singing contest together.
The reason the girls had been drifting apart before is that Keller was focusing all her energy into finding her past life friends (angels born on earth), Viola and Jasmin were in love with the same guy (Alex) who was in love with Viola, and they tried too hard not to let it affect their friendship, even though it did, while Sini felt like a complete outsider because everyone else was focused on everything but the Four Colours.
I struggle to think of anything positive and optimistic when it comes to popular music, books or movies from Finland. (The reason almost all of my favourites are from somewhere else. I know a lot of people like to wallow in suffering, and clearly that is mainstream over here, but I tend to favour a more positive spin on things.)
Viola & Alex had only been dating for a few months when the comic went on hiatus.
Josh and Cecil are two of Keller’s angel friends. (Despite the name, Cecil is a girl.) They’re both stubborn as hell.
Ater is Keller’s childhood friend, and his foster father is Deimos, one of Keller’s past life angel friends, who was a villain, because he though the other angels had betrayed him. (Yes, the name is an indicator that at the time he showed up in the story, I did not know Deimos was one of the angels, or that he would come to his senses by the end and be redeemed. But give me a break, I was 14.)
Keller came to indirectly find out that Ater was in love with her, shortly before the comic went on hiatus, and she was too detached from her feelings to know what to do about it. (And there was even this whole drama when everyone thought Keller and Josh were together…)
I’m making fun of Keller’s thought processes, which I took completely seriously when I was younger, and totally thought were a solid reason for the most serious drama in the comic.
Keller and Ater are both pretty passive characters who like to make things more complicated than they actually are, but it’s often Keller’s freak out that makes Ater come to his senses. He’s also a really cheesy guy and can say a lot of embarrassing things with a straight face.
So, here’s the story: Viola and Jasmin both fell for the new boy (Alex) in the class when they were in middle/junior high school. Alex had his eyes on Viola from the start. Viola had trust issues and couldn’t admit her feelings for Alex, because his flirting strategies were sending mixed signals, and so Viola couldn’t believe he was serious about her. Alex’s feelings were genuine from the start, he just wasn’t very good at expressing them, and always made himself, and Viola, seem like a joke. He gave up on Viola who was always crying for reasons unrelated to Alex (her brother had just left home to study and such) because he thought he bothered Viola so much that she cried because of it. Alex and Jasmin happened to meet at a party and got to know each other better, and started dating soon after, Alex thinking it would help him forget about Viola. This only confirmed to Viola that Alex had never been serious about her. Alex, however was not successful at forgetting about Viola, and soon broke up with Jasmin, leaving her heartbroken for almost half of the comic. Jasmin mustered up the courage to tell Viola that she’d noticed Alex really liked Viola instead, but Viola wouldn’t believe her. Only after everyone almost died saving Deimos from himself, Viola figured she might not have another chance to tell anyone how she felt about them, and confessed to Alex, who obviously returned her feelings. By the summer the girls were 16, Jasmin had got over Alex and was hoping for a summer romance. She ran into an older dude who ate her ice cream out of spite. Later he turned out to be Alex’s big brother who had just returned from his exchange year in England. Jasmin thought he was creepy and weird but eventually they started getting along, though Jasmin was too proud to admit it at first.
Pheeeeeew. No wonder the “main” plot always moved so slowly.
Mika and Roni both appeared in the comic very close to the hiatus, and their role in it was left open. Before the hiatus me and my friend drew a couple of pages together, switching panel by panel, and I told her I saw Jasmin and Mika falling in love at some point. She had been thinking Jasmin shouldn’t be with Mika because he’s Alex’s brother, and she’d been thinking of her and Roni instead. I said I thought Jasmin should be with Mika because he’s Alex’s brother. (Not because they’re similar but because I thought it would be a counterintuitive sort of thing.) She was still set on Roni, but after a couple of panels, she lifted her head, and said: “Wait. I get it now. Let it be Jasmin and Mika.” I always remember it as a funny moment.
Haha. This comic was very romance centred towards the end, which was uncharacteristic of me at the time, but it’s evident I didn’t mind writing the relationship drama.
My friend thought Sini and Roni would naturally end up together (which was fair), but I had my own ideas about them, and decided to put them to use in this epilogue.
At one point I was kind of irritated at the fact that everyone had to end up with someone, so that’s probably at least partly the reason why Viola turned out to play an annoying cupid in this comic. *Sigh* I’ve met my share of people like her.
I’m sure most people will see where this is going by now, so I’ll just say that Viola is generally an ignorant character who lives in her own bubble.
I always had fun with Viola dealing with her blind spots.
Sini is a pretty stable and no-nonsense kind of person, who doesn’t let her feelings out easily, so Viola really didn’t see that coming. But Sini is also possibly the most depended on the group of Four Colours, and was the loneliest the time they were drifting apart.
So, Keller’s been able to sense other people’s feelings ever since she was a child, and coming to terms with it is a big part of her story. Viola is the one who helps her the most. All the angels have some supernatural mind power, and this is hers. She doesn’t read minds though.
I knew long ago that in my mind Sini was in love with Keller, but I was actually a little afraid to go ahead and make it true in the comic, because I still wasn’t sure how my friend felt about LGBT+ characters. It probably would’ve been fine back then too, but I had to have this as a part of my epilogue since I never included that part of her in the old comic.
I really dragged out Viola’s cluelessness, huh? I knew a lot of people who were that thick, and I still do, so it’s not unrealistic in my mind, though.
In the old comic, Viola has a habit of acting thoughtlessly, and later overanalyzing it, and over-emphasizing her role in the events, so, her self-flagellation is annoying at times. She especially has a habit of undervaluing her positive effects in Keller’s life and focusing only on the times she’s been an ignorant friend. Viola has always acted kind of co-depended in her relationship with Keller. (The fact that she’s Viola’s literal guardian angel doesn’t help.)
Enter Auron. One of the nonsensical objects in the story. It’s (for some unknown reason) a seashell amulet that contained the past life memories of the earth born angels. Its power also helped Deimos translate texts the previous earth angels had written about their life a thousand years ago. It hasn’t been working since the angels got their memories back.
This is kind of cruel trolling. There were several occasions in the comic when a kiss or something was somehow magical, or broke a curse, which is such a cliché. I kind of felt like the story was asking for it, when it came to my head that this “physical expressions of love are magic” trope could be used the other way around as well, that it shouldn’t always work in your favor. This is also something that I wanted to do in the comic for a long time.
(No, this isn’t meta for sex diseases, and it’s also not commentary on what the nature thinks about hetero- or homosexuality, in case anyone was wondering. It’s to be understood only in the context of this story. If there’s any message at all, it’s not that it was wrong for these characters to have sex, or anything like that. It’s simply this: Sometimes you’re just plain unlucky and can’t have everything you want, and there’s no moral behind it.)
Now that I read this, it kind of also looks like I’m trolling Mormonism or something, with the nonsensical translation process, but I knew nothing about that religion when this element first appeared in the comic, so, it’s just a lucky coincidence.
Enter Viola’s trust issues.
Also, it’s true, it was a recurring thing that Keller always got some curse to threaten her life. Like, at least four times in the comic and two more times in pages that I ended up never sending to my friend. And it wasn’t even like I was the only one who wrote this stuff, my friend also liked cursing Keller. So, there was no WAY it wouldn’t happen again in this epilogue.
Oh, and by the way, Keller turning into an angel is also not a metaphor for any fast spreading illness. It’s what it is. Take it at face value, it’s only meant to be meaningful in the context of critiquing my own stories. Parallels are often simply coincidental 😀
It kind of broke my heart to draw this, since this comic was always so happy-go-lucky happily-ever-after kind of miracle parade. At some point I had planned something like this to happen in the comic (unironically -.-‘) but I always thought Keller would survive, and they would again find a way to keep her on earth. But I guess she’d been lucky way too many times already.
Yeah, because whether Keller lives or dies, has to be about you, Viola. Grow up. (Well, that was Viola’s general self-centred attitude in the comic.)
Did I fool you? Of course there’s a miracle at the end. Even at my most cynical, I’m still me.
So, this is where the five-year project ends, three years after it really ended. But really, this is just the start for a new story. I got a permission from my friend to rewrite these characters’ story in an alternate universe, so that’s what this comic is alluding to, and without that in mind, I’m sure I would not have drawn such a tragedy.
I definitely wanted Viola to grow more than this. I didn’t want Sini to feel like an outsider. I wanted to see who Jasmin was outside her romantic relationships. I wanted Keller to stop being a victim. Things only went to hell, so that I would get to start again, because I love these characters, but the comic is complete nonsense.
A recurring thing in my adult life seems to be that I turn my old comics into books and old books into comics. 😀 So, who knows where these characters will still go.
Back to: Old (Longer) Comics
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