BTB 6: The Long Journey to Our First Storyline

 If you've read previous BTB and character profiles then you know this series has been gestating for a long, long time. During that time I had a few stops and starts with where to begin our tale. How you start your story is important and I had a few different ways to start Billy's. Here, we're going to recollect all the times that Billy almost got his first storyline.

To be clear, by storyline I mean multi-part/page story arc.. While I had various ideas of how to start Bone Boy Billy, I ended up deciding to go with a series of character vignettes to start us up. Working as more of an introduction to each specific character I wanted to focus on. You could sort of call this a mini-arc like "Meeting the family" or something along those lines, but each comic is it's own separate story.

Now there was also the four part story where Billy learns to toughen up a little, but I'd consider that a mini-arc again. No, by our first storyline I'm talking several parts each comic/page leading directly to the next to tell a full story. 

We just wrapped up our first ever full storyline, 30 Minutes of Night introducing the character of Max and showing a little more of the town off as well. This was never really intended to be our first story. I wanted to introduce Max a little later but the more I thought on potential first stories this one just made the most sense to do.

Going back in time, our first real attempt at a Bone Boy Billy story was when I was still in High School. Back when I wasn't sure if I was going to draw the comic or get someone else to work on it with me. I wrote down a story to introduce Billy, his world, his friends and the town along with his conflict with his demonic little brother. It was to be a one-shot comic called Bone Boy Billy and the Hellish Halloween. I know, not a great title. 

I don't remember the exact details of the story, but I'll try to recount it as best I can. Basically, the story opens with Billy's origin, the magic lake reviving him, his pumpkin head friend getting said pumpkin for a head and meeting some of the townspeople like the friendly old comic shop owners. Billy was the only one who could see his little brother, Georgie, was actually a demon child and plotting to take over the town.

Due to Georgie's scheming, a truck carrying hundreds of cadavers from an old cemetery crashes and loses all the bodies into the lake. Georgie uses a spell to hurry up the revival and since they didn't have enough time to revive normally they come back as mindless zombies under his control. He unleashes the zombie horde on the town and it's up to Billy and co to stop him.

I don't really remember much from there. Billy stops Georgie, somehow, we get to see the old couple who runs the comic shop fight some zombies and in the end most of them are dealt with but Georgie still has a few left to do his bidding whenever he's up to no good. It set up the world decently and would have been a fun enough introduction I figure.

You can probably already see how I sort of adapted some of the elements from Hellish Halloween into 30 Minutes of Night. Siege of the town, only it's vampires lead by Max instead of Georgie and we even focus on the old comic shop couple like the original one-shot. Only they had changed a lot since then. We'll get to that in a character profile down the line.

For the longest time that was our first storyline. I had a second follow up story in mind but I'll talk about that another time, perhaps. This is focusing on the stories that never started things up, after all. It was many years later, I can't recall exactly when, I had a different idea for how to start up Bone Boy Billy.

Back then I was planning to try and get an anthology horror comic going and the idea was Billy would be a short comic in the back of each issue. Returning to the more Newspaper Funnies idea I'd had for it earlier on. This idea never got super far but I did sketch out a few potential attempts at making this one page comic for the back. I never really figured it out. Though I've included a mock-up in this article of what I had in mind back then.

It was a very simple story where Billy was running late to get home, so he cuts through the local cemetery. He's very creeped out and to keep himself calm he recounts his origin. Yes, I know, very clunky way of exposition but it was where my head was at for a succinct way to tell the story and introduce our boy.

At the end of the comic, Billy gets spooked by a ghost, but it's okay because it's his dad! Yeah, back in this iteration, Billy's dad was gonna be around as a ghost. He'd go to him for advice and they'd just hang out sometimes. That was before I decided Billy's dad is a mystery to everyone including myself. I wrote down his backstory and then drank an amnesia potion so I've no clue who or what his deal is. 

It was a very basic, simple idea to mostly get the origin out of the way and establish Billy having a friendly relationship with the supernatural. It never got much farther than that, but it was would I would call an attempt at an introduction, very truncated, storyline for the comic.

Now we come to the 2018 attempt at bringing Billy back. It was during this time that 30 Minutes of Night was first cooked up for our introduction to Max. Though again that was far from an early story idea and was planned to introduce him later on down the line. My first attempt at a Bone Boy Billy storyline was a story that would sort of introduce the theme/idea of the series.

I'm going to be a bit more vague about this story because elements of it will probably get used in a comic down the line. The idea was Billy is off from school and walking home, decides to cut through the woods. Only there's a problem, there's a rainbow blocking the path. Even weirder, it's a rainbow with a face that talks. He calls himself the Painbow and says no one's getting through until he finds his body. 

Turns out Painbow was a spirit and he couldn't find his body anywhere. Billy agreed to help him, finds the body nearby and the spirit thanks him as he moves on. Billy returns home and tells his mom he thinks he knows what he wants to do with his life. His mom jokes that it's very mature of him to figure that out at ten years old. 

That was our introduction storyline. Much like the 2023/2024 release of the series I initially wanted a couple of comics to introduce the characters. That's where ideas like Georgie just messing with Billy or a comic where Zindy was on the phone with her mom while the boys fought in the background. I was definitely channeling a lot of Calvin and Hobbes energy into those early comics I drew on actual real paper that I'll have to scan some day.

While the 2018 attempt at making Billy comics ended up not working out, I still carried over a ton of design work/ideas from that period. Lots of what was going to be in that comic made it into the final version. Stuff like Zindy being a witch, Max, his best friend being a pumpkin, a lot of that started there and got finalized in early 2023.

Which brings us to modern day and the first storyline I planned to tell with Bone Boy Billy. I actually wrote down a few different arcs for possible stories to go over and considered each one for a possible starter this time. While the plan was still to get the character introductions out of the way, along with a general vibe of the comic with various other pages I had made, I still wanted our first long form story to tell. 

30 Minutes of Night was considered and I planned for it be our second storyline instead. Our first storyline is actually a comic I roughed out the entirety of but never finished. This was a comic storyline I worked on sporadically through early 2024 I believe. While it initially didn't have name, I ended up calling it Mythical Quest or something along those lines, a basic description of what it was.

This was a story I actually hadn't written down. Instead, the idea sparked from doodling an old hag. I think I was trying to draw the Old Witch from EC comics but I messed it up and as I often do, I just kept doodling and came up with a grotesque character I thought looked interesting enough to come up with a story. My idea was she would ask Billy and co for a favor and they'd fetch it for her with the promise of a delicious treat.

From there I kind of riffed my way through each page. I had an idea where Billy wanted to show Nancy the fantastical world just outside Serling. I was very much inspired by that episode of Gravity Falls where they did the same thing, meeting a bunch of magical creatures out in the woods. I even planned to bring the Painbow back, as you can see in some of the pages I'm sharing here! Though the idea was he was just a dumb guard, not a spirit in need of any help.

One idea I had for a background gag was that Oltan and Nancy didn't like each other. That they'd fight over the Stab-bat and were very competitive in general. My idea was that they both wanted to be Billy's best friend and so they fought regularly over who that was, often with Billy none the wiser. I dropped that idea for the comic. Now it's Georgie and Oltan who have beef, as you'll see in a future comic soon here.

Billy wanted to try and impress his buddies and as a gag, tries to order beer from the pub. The Orc Bartender shows a sign saying no Skellingtons allowed to drink. I remember really finding that funny. For some reason. After that, wandering the market the old woman tasks Billy to bring her a dragon egg in exchange for the finest sweets.

Now here's a part where I kind of feel I was stumbling for ideas. Stealing is really not in Billy's book of tricks and he's especially never steal a child from a parent. I wasn't really considering that, just figuring I would make it work for the bit. And to be fair there were some pages I was honestly proud of with how well roughed out the gag was. 

I was particularly happy with the page above where Billy offers two routes, one with a screaming flesh abomination and the other with rabid flying teeth. I remember being inspired by the Bull Worm in Spongebob when coming up with that nightmare fuel. I still really like this page so I want to find some way to work this gag in again sometime. 

Billy and co find the dragons cave and steal it. It's here I really had a split on what to do next. I didn't want Billy getting his new friend hurt but I also didn't want him stealing a baby. It felt wrong, no matter what angle I looked at it. It just didn't fit the character and rather than bend the character to fit the story, I changed the story to fit the character and halfway running, Billy stops and returns the egg. 

Despondent that they won't get their treats, Oltan then reveals he's got an old dragon egg in his noggin he forgot about and they trade that instead. I did love the idea that they went through all that and Oltan had the solution the whole time. It felt very in character for him. 

Overall I didn't hate this story and as I mentioned I plan to incorporate elements of it into future comics where I can. Painbow will get his comic debut eventually. I like his stupid name and face too much to waste using him. Some of these pages or this story might get totally reinvented down the road. Either way, that's the tale of the second to last attempt at a first storyline.

While we're here, we might as we talk about the developing of 30 Minutes of Night. First up, I didn't even settle on that name until releasing the comic. I had a few different titles but none of them really worked. I don't love the name, but it works for what it is. After mid 2024 when I finally got back on the horse of working on Billy comics, somewhere along that point I decided this would be our first storyline after I wasn't happy with the more fantasy oriented previous idea. 

It felt like our first real major storyline should be more horror oriented since that was how the series has always existed in my head. We're a silly spooky comic first, more fantasy elements can come in later but I wanted some proper scary monsters for our fist story. Vampires worked well as did getting to introduce a major character with Max. 

Even then, some things changed along the way. I wasn't entirely sure how many pages it would be, I was figuring around 10-ish probably. It turned into 13 overall. One major change is how Billy and Max never actually fought. In the 2018 idea, they had a back and forth fight revealing Max has a pretty cool power. One I ended up not working into the actual story. For now. It will get introduced down the line. 

Another change was when I released the comic. It was late 2024 when I was drawing the first pages for the story, with the idea to be releasing it in late January early February of this year. As you now know, it ended up releasing a lot later on than that. For a few reasons. Mainly, I was originally planning to start lettering the comic with a computer program from this point on. So a couple weeks were wasted on trying to learn a program I really didn't jive with and never worked out. Eventually giving up on that and deciding to just keep hand-lettering for now, with the plan to get it properly lettered if we get a print version some day.

So that delayed things, along with coming up with constant new comic ideas that I wanted to put out before our first storyline. Ideas like the four parter with Billy learning a new ability and Oltan eating the space bug. I just kept putting off the comic, not lettering the last few pages and eventually it finally saw the light of day. Though there was one last change and that was in the number of pages.

Originally 12 pages, a couple weeks back I had an idea for a fun lore gag I wanted to do but I figured it was too late, the story had started and I didn't think I could just add a page. But then looking at where the story was, I figured I could add this one moment. Page 7, the vampire revealing UV/Sunlight doesn't actually kill vampires. This, and the line about Dracula are very important lore bites for the series going forward as well as other comics/stories I want to tell in the universe.

Now our first storyline is finally wrapped up, it was a lot of fun to tell this story! I'm really pleased with how it turned out and I'm looking forward to telling lots and lots more stories with these characters as we continue on. I hope you'll join us. We've got a very ambitious Halloween special this year and even bigger stories to come!