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Massina

In a world much like our own, a young girl called Massina begins to discover that there's more to reality than what she's known.

Massina Smythjones has always had the ability to see spirits. When she was a child, it was cute, but now that she's thirteen, it's starting to cause problems. Kids talk. Even her closest friends are starting to get tired of the wild stories.

Massina can't help who she is--and she wouldn't stop the visions even if she could. They're a part of her.

But when she meets a mysterious cat, the precarious balance of her life is disturbed, as the truth behind the things she's seen all her life begins to reveal itself.

Massina is a single-draft comic by RALWORKS.

"Single Draft"

I draw Massina with a simple rule: no pencil; no erasing; no redrawing. I operate from only a loose plan, and once a mark's made, it's final.

Hang in there--the illustrations get better fast.

The style of Massina is and always will be loose and experimental. When something doesn't quite work, I leave it in and move on.

That being said, the experimentation pays off. There is a steady progression in style, detail, and polish as the pages go on.

Why single-draft?

Massina is currently my side-project, with my main project being The Roots We Grew and Severed.

With this story, I wanted to try to re-capture the improvised, easygoing feel of the comics I used to draw as a child. In fact, Massina herself is based on the main character of one of the first "long form" comics I ever drew, starting from the age of eight.

Working on my first few serious attempts at graphic novels (The Incurable Quake Family and The Lake and Her Young are some of these, if you're curious), I found I had a burnout problem. After all the months spent planning, scripting, and storyboarding, and then page after laborious page to illustrate in the years that followed, I tended to crash hard, and stop.

I realized that this was, to a great extent, a problem of the loss of joy in the illustration.

So, as an experiment, I decided to draw a comic with my own joy as the main goal. This is the result.