Peach Fuzz - Development

Development

As a young girl, Lindsay Cibos frequently read comic books such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Gargoyles. After learning about manga, she preferred it to comics because it had art and female-centered storylines that appealed to her. She found it easier to get into manga because they were self-contained stories that started at the beginning. She learned about Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga contest from a Tokyopop Newsblast e-mail but was unable to work on an entry for the contest because of other projects. For the second contest, she worked with Jared Hodges, whom she had met at an anime club in 1998, and set aside a month to work on her entry; she wanted to "make a good concise little story for the contest's 20-page limit." Based on a web-comic that the two had been working on, their entry "Peach Fuzz" won the grand prize, was published in Tokyopop's anthology and turned into a manga series of the same name. While drawing the series, Cibos and Hodges encountered the challenge of working with the screentone and "digitally inking" the comic.

Some of Peach Fuzz is based on real-life ferrets and places. The creators designed the ferret characters Peach and Edwin after Cibos's pet ferrets Momoko—Japanese for Peach—and Elf. They also modeled several of Edwin's mannerisms on Elf's. Elf's "single-minded obsession to a pair of headphones" became the model for "Pavaratty’s devotion to his toy microphone". In contrast, the human characters have no specific model. Cibos stated: "Bits and pieces were likely inspired from the people around me and from an amalgam of life experiences Jared and I had growing up: remembering what it was like to be in the fourth grade, having a pet for the first time, dealing with bullies, misunderstandings with parents, and so on." Several of the locations in Peach Fuzz, such as Mimi's apartments, were designed after real-life places.

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    The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.
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