Photographs in Boxes, part one

Drawing younger versions of characters you've been drawing for two and a half years is surprisingly difficult work. There's the challenge of making them look noticably younger. Kali, fortunately, not only has a network of lines on her face in recent times, but also a different nose than when she first arrived. Tara isn't particularly distinctive to begin with, and since she probably wouldn't have had her dreadlocks at fourteen or fifteen, I had to figure out some way of giving her hair with the repeating orange-yellow. I have to say, perhaps it does look a bit like she already has dreads at that point, albeit not very tightly wound ones.
Rather than explicitly stating the year or the timeframe in captions, Mary chose to script a more show-don't-tell approach to the scale of time involved; school uniform obviously suggests a certain window of time, but harder is working out quite what an angry teenager like Kali would have worn back then. The answer comes in the form of those four icons of britpop, the All Saints, who have since all failed to have anything resembling a career, apart from the one who is banging a Gallagher. Possibly. The hoodie and the combat pants are direct All Saints fashion school; I imagine under that hoodie Kali is wearing a vest, since as memory serves the whole military-chic vest-and-combats was a big thing for them. The hairstyle is a direct rip from one of the Appleton sisters, since the only alternatives from the mid-to-late nineties were Aniston hair or the lesbian pixie cut favoured by the likes of Natalie Imbruglia.


DAVID'S DVD EASTER EGGS:

Kali's bra is very faintly visible through her school shirt in the photograph on the third panel.