Kali Teal, the Girl Dragged into a New World
This is a series of posts detailing old ideas for The Mannamong and explaining their changes or omissions up to the final draft.
As the main protagonist of The Mannamong, Kali Teal has grown with me for more than half of my life since I came up with the character in middle school. And throughout that time, the amount of detail I invested in her look and role greatly changed. Like I mentioned in my previous post, Lilo and Stitch inspired me to create The Mannamong by focusing on the relationship between a girl and a creature. But I had ideas to turn that story into something far grander for the child to explore with the creature she befriends. So first off, let’s talk about her appearance.
Upon comparing the two, it’s probably no surprise that Lilo inspired much of Kali’s design. I hadn’t nailed down her current look when I was younger, considering I was still a newbie at drawing, but the two were similar in my mind. The skin tone and big nose were the most defining traits they ended up sharing in the end.
I wasn’t sure how to make Kali stand out for a long time. But when I learned about the silhouette approach to drawing in college, I thought her nose would help make her stand out by emphasizing its shape. This was also influenced by Jeff Smith’s Bone, which I was reading at the time. Whose main character, Fone Bone, was drawn with a cartoonish design reminiscent of Pogo and other early sequential art styles. So that somewhat inspired Kali’s proportions as well, with her large hands and feet. That comic also influenced my inking style for The Mannamong. Nowadays, people point out her nose too much. Making me a bit self-conscious about how consistently and prominently I make it every time I draw her. Heh. So mission accomplished, I suppose?
She originally had long black hair, probably longer than Lilo’s. Her age shifted over the years from being as young as six to ten. I eventually settled on making her eight years old. When working on my art during my last two years of college, I shortened her hair when I realized she looked too similar to her mother, Vianne. The design of her unkempt hair was inspired by the concept art of Princess Garnet from Final Fantasy 9. So I went for this messy look to fit her upbringing of living in the woods and dealing with rapid fevers. Instead of the straight, refined hair I originally planned to give her. Besides, I have another character in mind who would interact with Kali that I would prefer to provide that look for instead…
Kali’s daytime outfit was also heavily inspired by a combination of the outfits worn by Garnet and another character named Eiko. The color scheme is based on the original main look I gave to Kali back in the day: a lavender sweater with olive green cargo pants.
In the early script
Looking back, I’m honestly drawing a blank on how I wrote her as a character because she was so reactionary to the mannamong characters while learning everything about their world. She was a surrogate audience kind of character, and still is to some extent. But this came with the expense of lacking a defining personality to work with. After college, I eventually understood this; it prompted a drastic change to the story and her relationship with Tontorus for the final draft. Still, again, that’s another topic I want to cover later.
So if I had this character for so long and I wasn’t sure what her story was even about, why didn’t I scrap her for a more interesting main lead? Did I have to have a human as the main character in a story about “The Mannamong”? The main takeaway is that she was always planning to significantly influence Tonto’s arc. Since this story is primarily about them, she would’ve befriended him right away and did her best to help him in some way that would’ve made Tontorus grow to care for her well-being. I even had ideas of her aging throughout the story as Tontorus adjusts to being the rock to her emotional development. And I like the novelty of following a protagonist who grows from a child into an adult.
The change in Kali
All in all, Kali is meant to be the heart of the series. And that required having a theme in which she reflects that, just like family, is the message to Lilo and Stitch. So when it came to Kali’s inquiry to The Mannamong, I decided to flip the story upside its head. What if she was getting what she wanted, but not in a pleasant manner? How would she react? Would she behave negatively to her circumstances or turn them around for good? Would she be able to at her maturity level? These were the kind of questions that popped up as I wrote the first chapter. And without spoiling too much ahead, I decided it’s all about her journey. How she handles it would reflect the comic’s central message. And a lot of that involves how she sees Tontorus.