PART ONE
PART TWO
PART TWO PART 2
PART THREE
PART FOUR
PART FIVE
Whoa, REALLY lost track of time this time, can’t believe the last Shadowhistory installment was about three weeks ago. O_o Where did all that time go???
This installment of Shadowhistory is about Sparkle and the “Mummy Girl.” Around the time I was coming up with the core Shadoweyes characters, I realized the three main characters (Scout, Kyisha, and Noah) were all very serious, dour characters, and there needed to be someone to balance that and add some levity, as well as a character to counterbalance Scout herself. So I came up with Sparkle Park, who wasn’t just a cheery, fun, light-hearted character to balance the seriousness of the other characters, she was HYPER-cheery and then some!
Her original name was Temple Park, I can’t remember where that name came from exactly but obviously Sparkle is way better. She didn’t change all that much from the earliest sketches, mostly in body type and color scheme, but the basic idea of the character was there early on.
One of the inspirations for Sparkle’s storyline was the case of Romona Moore (warning: murder, kidnapping, police racism, other terrible stuff). I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it publicly before because the conflation of fiction and real life crime has always felt disrespectful to me (especially, in this particular case, as a white person), but this was a big influence on Shadoweyes. Back then I hadn’t yet gotten super into true crime like I am now, and the Romona Moore case was one of the first cases that sent me down that road. It really shook me, and opened my eyes to what I found out later was called “missing white woman syndrome.” So a summary of the Romona Moore case is that she disappeared, her mother tried to get the cops to search for her/investigate, they brushed it off and didn’t do anything, and eventually Romona was found dead, with zero help from the police.
So in the comic, Sparkle is kidnapped and goes missing, no search is mounted for her, and Scout/Shadoweyes makes it her mission to step up and find her (and in her lair she keeps a wall of all the other flyers for missing kids who have yet to be found). And of course everything turns out okay, which is why it’s always felt disrespectful, since Romona’s case turned out anything but okay, she and all these other missing peopls didn’t have a superhero to rescue them. Putting superheroes into real-life situations or dealing with real-life issues is a fraught approach, it’s a very hard needle to thread without it coming off as tacky at best and disrespectful at worst.
Anyway, that was the seed of Sparkle’s initial storyline. And that’s where “the Mummy Girl” comes in, Sparkle’s kidnapper and Scout’s first real adversary.
This was something I hemmed and hawed about early on, whether to have Sparkle’s kidnapper be a normal person and not a “monster” at all like a real-life case, or have it be more of a supervillain type. The supervillain approach goes back to it feeling disrespectful, but in some ways it’s maybe also more respectful because it further divorces the story from the real people who were never rescued. For better or worse I went with that approach.
I can’t quite remember where the idea for the Mummy Girl came from, I guess maybe just that I wanted to draw a spooky horror movie slasher type character who is also tragic. Originally the character’s name was Risen, as in risen from the dead, but I don’t recall there ever being any script drafts where she actually refers to herself as that name (since she never speaks) so she’s always just “the Mummy Girl” because of the strips of cloth she wears.
Her origin is never explained, partly because she doesn’t talk, and partly because I just like characters with mysterious unknown origins! In her final design, I made her covered in scars so it’s implied that she suffered some grievous injury possibly at the hands of someone else, and left for dead. Scout finds her near death, buried in the city dump, and leaves her at the hospital for treatment but of course the Mummy Girl shambles off on her own and causes trouble. Everyone around her seems to ignore her as she passes, except Sparkle, who the Mummy Girl then fixates on.
I eventually ditched the mask she had early on and made the galoshes she wears ones that Sparkle was wearing when she was abducted, like the Mummy Girl likes something about the galoshes and takes them for herself.
Her psychology and mental state is never really explored, I felt like giving her a real-life mental illness would again feel disrespectful and tasteless, so I tried to keep her more in line with horror/thriller movie logic. She has a big scar on her head so it’s implied that maybe she’s lost her memory from a massive head injury, like maybe she’s the victim of someone even worse. I always liked the Batman type villains who are normal people made into villains against their will, like Two-Face or Poison Ivy, or tragic horror movie villains like Jason Voorhees or the Phantom of the Opera.
NEXT TIME ON SHADOWHISTORY: THE SHADOWEYES CURSE!!!
Very cool. I like that you acknowledged missing white girl syndrome. A horrible thing that happens. I like that Shadoweyes takes it upon herself to help the missing girls.
nice!