Sabine Ganezer
Moxie
Above: My series title page/thumbnail design.
All Bruni wants in life is to brighten the local world with her whimsical bakery creations, but Mox the Obnoxious and Ill-Intentioned has other ideas.
The pint-sized wannabe demon has to complete a "thesis project" of sorts in order to be admitted to the ranks of Hell, and his time is running out. If he doesn't create a threshold amount of havoc in the world of the living by the end of the year, he will disintegrate and lose his chances at true demonhood. So naturally, he chooses a purely "good" human to corrupt. He tells her she is destined to become the most terrible supervillain/enchantress/pirate of her generation, and that he has been sent to guide her on her journey to great evil-ness. She is convinced he has her mixed up with someone else. They have adventures together as he tries to corrupt her (actually an angel's-child destined to help save the world, not destroy it), she tries to chase her dreams and get rid of him, her secretly super-genius cat Mr. Fløöf does his best to stay out of it... and maybe some other characters come into the picture. (There was a key-lime-pie werewolf guy involved in some of my planning drafts.) Eventually, she discovers his lie; eventually, he chooses to support her dreams even though it means sacrificing his chance to become a true demon.
Above: Sketches of the demon character, including the scar where his left wing once was. The idea of a 1-winged demon is inspired by Azebethibou, a Jewish mythological demon who was trapped under the sea with one red wing to await the end of the world.
I started developing this comic in January 2021. I guess I kind of ran out of steam. Maybe I was confused by all the different threads I had thought about pursuing later on in the plot. Also the characters weren't quite real enough to grab my attention. Hopefully at some point I will go back to it, or at least find a use for some of the better aspects of the concept.
Above: Sketches of the two main characters, Bruni the baker and Mox the demon. I didn't go through many different stages of designing Bruni; she came rather naturally. The demon was a different story -- I didn't want to seem to just be ripping off Luci from Disenchantment, but I did want the all-black look and some identifying demonic characteristics (like the horns and claws.)
Above: An earlier developmental exploration sketch of Mox and Bruni, along with an early -- and rather unoriginal -- title idea.
This comic idea was inspired by Luci, the "personal demon" in the Netflix original series Disenchantment, created by Matt Groening. I wanted to create something that focused more on the personal journey of a creature whose supposed purpose was to ruin someone's life, and how that character ends up getting attached to their "victim" and would rather help than hurt them. The theme of going against one's programming or "job description," as well as the personality expectations society assigned them before their birth (or hatching, or bursting fully formed from a burping volcano underground, as the case may be) is a theme that has been interesting me for a while now.
Inspirations for the concept also included the awesome Webtoon comics Brimstone and Roses by Mei Rothschild and IM THE WIZARD by Daniel Chase.
Above: I worked on my own demon-aesthetic font for some of the lettering in the comic. I was pretty happy with most of the letters in this draft.
I only finished a few "episodes" or scenes, which I posted on Webtoon; I'll also put them here.
I didn't finish the part of this scene where he takes her to a cafe in the underworld. Pretend that already happened; continuing...
