Illiana for the Comics

Illiana

for the

Comics

When I decided to publish Demmy�s World as a syndicated comic strip, I knew at once Illutiana was going to be a part of it. She had been with Demmy for seven years now and I saw no reason to trade her in for a more realistic model. Still, I decided, rather wisely, to change her to a more realistic model, and the first thing that had to go was that name. Now, if you�ve been reading this from the beginning you�ve probably pronounced �Illutiana� in your head, right? So how do you hear it? �Ill-lu-tee-ana� or �Ill-lu-shee-ana�?(The second is right.) People seldom pronounced her name correctly upon first reading it, that was one reason for the change, also �Illutiana� is a stupid name. But if you know me you also know I hate change. I like things to stay exactly as they are, even when they are bad, so the decision to change her name was still a reluctant one, and �Illiana� was the closest "normal" name to �Illutiana� that I could think of.

    That taken care of, I had to age her some. There was never any set age for Illutiana she was just sort of this pretty kitty mommy girl. I guess somewhere in my head I assumed she was my age because she was originally me, but since she had a seven year old daughter and I was 20 at the time that clearly wouldn�t do. So I had to make her a realistic age. I made her 34. The reason for this was simple. I want to have my first child at age 27. If Demmy was seven (which she is) and if Illy stuck to my schedule for mommying (which, since I made her up, of course she did) that would put her at 34. I felt pretty good about this because it didn�t encourage children to rush out and go get pregnant at an early age (a very bad idea).
     I toyed with the idea of changing her hair to pure white, or pure white with light pastel rainbow highlights, but the truth is I liked her the way she was, so I left it. I also tried making her human, but in that case I had reverted back to a model that really looked like me, so I felt I was being obvious. I decided to leave her looks and work on her personality.
     Illy had previously been obnoxiously sweet and caring, kind, gentle natured, tolerant, etc. Very nice if you want a model of an angel with a punk wig, very bad if you want a funny comic strip mommy. I decided to make her more �human�. Now she worries and frets and gets frustrated like the rest of us. She�s a little like me, a little like my mom, and a little like a stereotyped modern woman. That made her a lot less two-dimensional and also a bit easier to relate to. Lately I�ve written a few strips that focus on Illiana as the main character, this gives her the opportunity to grow as a character and develop. I hope that she�s not done growing and changing, as I am still not completely satisfied with her.

I had to age Illiana a bit for my strip so that it didn't look like a case of babies having babies--something I did not want to encourage.

2001

My last few words on Illy