THEME/WORLDVIEW: What if the world of the dead was real and spirits could give the living advice on living. The theme from Shawshank redemption: “ Get busy living or get busy dying”
BASIC PLOT: A orphan girl is trying to keep her family’s noodle cart running and survive, but she’s only surviving, not really living. She’s visited by spirits who change her perspective on life. She decides to try and incorporate her dreams and art into her life as much as she can while still getting by. And that’s what her family truly would have wanted.
START:
Start with a splash Title page of the girl (holding a bowl of noodles? wearing an apron) surrounded by monsters and spirits at night.
STORY START:
Grandma and girl get up early together and walk to work together. They happily work together at their noodle cart during the day.
A family comes to their cart with a small child and the child is crying because she had a nightmare. Grandmother says to the child, “don’t worry, just call the Dream Eater three times, he will take your bad dreams away.” The child is comforted, grandma smiles and goes back to cooking. (Main character notices this.)
While grandma makes noodles at home, the girl is drawing. They don’t have much but they are happy.
Grandmother is dressing her in kimono and fixing her hair.
They go together to the shrine to pray at New Years. It’s snowing. Show the grandmother looking lovingly at the girl as she prays.
Grandmother sells one of her hairpins to buy ink for the girl to draw with?
START OF LOW POINT:
Girl is up late drawing, she gets up to go to bed and finds that grandmother, who looks asleep, is dead.
The girl is putting her drawing brush with the flowers on her grandmothers altar and says goodbye.
The girl wakes up alone in the house, “Let’s get going, grandmother…”, (she’s talking to grandma like she’s there, even though she knows she isn’t.) she puts on her grandmother’s haori (jacket) and walks down the dark morning street alone. “I’ll work hard, grandmother.”
Some shots of her working and serving soba to people.
Other young people her age are walking around the area she works, but they are playing and eating while she is working.
LOW POINT?
While she’s working, maybe she knocks over her ink in the cart…? or ruins some artwork she did…?
we hear grandma OS: “You create beauty, sweetheart. You will fill the world with beauty and beauty changes people’s lives. “
She cleans up the mess and is close to tears. Close up of a bowl of soba, her hands adding toppings to it
she hands the bowl to a customer, we see her face
“Sorry, grandma.” wide shot of soba cart on a busy street at night with the stars.
PLEA FOR HELP:
She walks by a Inari kitsune shrine after working late. It’s dark, it’s the hour of the OX (witching hour), like 1-3 am. She prays at the shrine for success, “Grandmother, help me.”
As she walks off you see a few kitsune glowing flames come up floating behind her, she doesn’t notice.
CATALYST:
The next night at her cart, the crowds start to thin out, and it becomes suddenly empty, and someone enters her cart. Perhaps we just see from her perspective with the cart awning cloths covering most of the person, you just see their body and the chin sit down. She makes soba noodles for them and then, the person starts talking to her…. you start to see little edges of something weird about this person, is their face blurring out and changing? She’s not sure what she’s seeing. The person asks her, “Your grandmother died… but are YOU really still alive…? It seems your energy is just seeping out of you. Perhaps you will be a dead thing soon…?” And we see that it is a kitsune. “What are you talking about?! What are you?”
She’s suddenly pulled into a night parade of demons. It’s chaotic and scary. There are really weird monsters like long-necked women, Bakeneko (cat woman), giant skeletons, kyokotsu ghost, monster umbrellas, dragons, etc in a seething crowd She tries to stay with the kitsune through the crowd.
She gets chased by a few scary monsters like a big crow demon (Tengu), horned demons like oni.
She runs and escapes the demon parade, perhaps she runs into a grove of trees…? She catches her breath. She thinks the demon parade she saw is a bad dream and she calls the Dream eater to take the nightmare away just like her grandmother said. He comes, and he starts taking her dreams. This would be shown as a physical cloud coming out of her into the Dream Eater’s mouth. It starts out that he’s taking the nightmare, but he keeps going and starts to eat away her aspirational dreams of being an artist, too! She tries to stop him, physically pulling the visual manifestation of the dream (like a cloud) back to herself… and so she starts to realize that that dream IS important to her.
FADE TO WHITE, she finds herself somewhere alone… perhaps there are butterflies around her…?
SIDENOTE: I’m hoping to make this first volume about 20-22 pages, and then add guest art by friends of the characters and work-in-progress process pages and some yokai encyclopedia type information in the back to make it a longer and more valuable volume,.
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NEXT VOLUME:
She is trying to do the noodle cart AND drawing and does ok for a little while but then starts getting exhausted and frustrated. She falls asleep while drawing, she falls asleep while cooking at her cart. Maybe she even falls asleep at a shrine, and wakes up to….
meet a SHINIGAMI death god, creature who lures people to death or suicide, walking amongst graves. The idea being, don’t you want to live…? She has to choose to live. Why not die? What is the point if you’re not going to do anything?
ADDITIONAL: maybe she meets a YUKI ONNA (snow woman). She died in the snow. Perhaps she could have accomplished many things but she died too soon?
ADDITIONAL: or perhaps she meets a TANUKI who is a drunk singing trickster and sings her a tale that mirrors her life.
LAST VOLUME:
Have to have some sort of resolution where she gets someone to help her, maybe she finds a young boy/girl to help…? so that she can compromise and balance her life so she can draw and survive.
She meets the cherry blossom tree goddess. She reminds her of the fleetingness of life, and it fades out in a cloud of petals and she wakes up under the sakura tree.
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ART STYLE:
I would draw the characters in my typical way, but adding some inspiration from traditional woodblock prints (Hokusai) in the way backgrounds are handled.
I would start by doing the pages with strong large areas of flat black like the manga XXXHolic. If I have time later, I would add limited flat colors like Hellboy comic. The colors would be pulled from vintage Japanese art.
XXXHolic:
HELLBOY:
