WANDERERS DEVLOG #1: THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
early poster I made for it, with an early character design for the protagonist. background photo is mine, taken at the detroit zoo
Like many other writers and artists out there, I have many story ideas. I store them away in a spreadsheet in my Obsidian vault, neatly organized with whatever information I have at hand: a title, a genre, a premise, any notes I might need. I think I have around 16 listed in there right now.
Like many other writers and artists out there, I also have a terrible problem with deciding which one should be worked on first. It can't be one of the bigger projects (and of course my brain reaaally wants to work on one of these and nothing else), I know damn well the best bet is to start working on the shorter, simpler stories first, get those atrophied comic-making muscles going again. But man, which project should I start with?
Now I have my answer!
Wanderers At The End Of The World ("Wanderers" for short) is an in-development xenofiction comic about butterfly-cat type creatures undergoing a migration before the world they know ends.
bust sketch of ZÃnia, one of the main characters in her early design
It's based on real life Monarch butterflies, also called Wanderers as a regional name! The very early drafts were far more grounded and closer to the actual Monarch lifecycle, but over time I found myself making the story more fantasy and more surreal as my stories tend to get, heh. That said, the other big source of inspiration for Wanderers as a story is as grounded as can be, because it's very much inspired by my own life as I go from Brazil to Canada as a grad student. It's about that leap of faith into a big unknown, potentially the biggest one ever does, the exhilaration, the fear, the anxiety, the excitement, all of it!
I originally came up with the concept mid-2024, as a Clangen comic loosely based on my gameplay. Clangen is a game based on Warrior Cats where you generate a clan of kitties of your own and see what events transpire over the months. It's very popular for people to illustrate dramatic events from the game (often as little comics) and that was my initial plan too, until I decided I wanted my thing to be 100% original and completely detached from Clangen and from Warriors as a whole. Everything you see in Wanderers is my own, from the worldbuilding to the plot to the designs, with the only holdover from their early Clangen-based days being that the characters are still part cat. It's cute so I kept it!
very early concept sketches for Cardo, one of the main characters
Honestly, the decision to sever all ties to Clangen/Warriors and make it original was really good for the story. Because Clangen runs are interpretations of the game's events, it means that you don't always get Something to work with since it's all RNG, and I really wanted to tell a cohesive story y'know? I struggled a lot to make it work, including doing more than one run, at which point doing it as a Clangen run started seeming kind of pointless. Isn't it easier to just... do what I want instead? Besides, isn't it better to have my own thing going and not be tied to someone else's IP?
character concepts including caterpillars, now very outdated
In the end I think what really cemented my decision to go the full original route was having my future plans go up in flames in November 2024. I watched the election results in real time, and I watched the roadmap of my life get obliterated in real time, and I felt scared and lost and like my path had gotten blocked and I didn't know what to do. As I sat there in the dark of my room watching the map of a country that wasn't mine and was now most likely never going to be mine, I had a vision of butterflies losing their way in a storm.
Like many other writers and artists out there, my life interacts directly with the way I create. I knew then that Wanderers was going to have its own plot, and it was going to be a lot more inspired by my own life than the earlier drafts had been.
I didn't pick this story up for most of the following year. I was busy rerouting my life plans through a different path and in the meantime my brain creatively latched onto a different project (Vitrais and its vampires, together with a Vampire the Masquerade game I was gearing up for). In late 2025, when I had my Canada plans more firmly in place, I ran into a comics mentorship by the wonderful Chico Oliveira with open spots and I was overcome with the feeling that this is it, this is the time to have Wanderers enter production. So I applied, and I got in, and now after a couple months of work I have a plot!! I have an actual story in my hands!!
It's rough and it's probably going to change quite a bit, but now I have a good idea of where to go and how. I'm doing the first draft for the script now, and I know that's ALSO going to change quite a bit. But you can't fix a house that doesn't exist, and I'm quite happy with how the foundation work is going.
