Comic
Logline
Follow 23-year-old mage Junah on her adventure of discovery and independence alongside her assigned partner Kaelen, a wizard of sorts, at the Institute or Mystical, Magical, & Mythical Arts located at the Heart of Lufiriya; a magical mashup of beings, cultures, and lifestyles trying to coexist in one nation.
Quote:
"One size fits all you say? Nothing that ever says that means that." - Junah
Applies in life and clothes!
What making MagicalMashup! means to me:
Growing up as a fat black gal who loves fantasy/sci-fi and fiction in general, I NEVER got to see characters that resembled me as story leads or as the focus of fantastically illustrated works of art. It was hard enough to find black characters, let alone black women, and then add on plus-size/fat... GOOD LUCK. It used to be that finding any two of the 3 parts would elate me no matter how minor the role she was, but hanging on scaps isn't enough to feed the hunger I had for characters that I could relate to on a physical level.
Once I started taking my art seriously, I noticed the impact of how not seeing myself in the media I consumed affected my art. This took years and is in no small part thanks to the beautiful depictions of all kinds of women just existing in Sophie Campbell's art and comics that made me feel seen and excited. Thanks to Sophies's art /comics as well as encouragement from my loved ones, I started to draw characters based on the people around me and stopped trying to mimic the atypical looks of women presented to me by the genres I loved. I drew tall gals, fat gals, muscular gals, nonbinary/gender conforming folks, and just really fell in love with the beauty of creating with diversity and an open mind.
Once I finally started to see more media featuring BIPOC fat/plus-sized folks in comics and on tv, they were side-characters, joke-characters, or meant to be villains. I love Ursula as much as the next big gal, but It hurt that the commutative amount of reps for gals like me always fell into the negative side of life with being destined to fail and be unhappy or just be a never-ending joke. It sucked because I'm a person just like anyone else, so why couldn't I have stories like everyone else?
Sure I'm fat, but there's more to me than just that and I want to see more stories that have fat and nonatypical-looking gals existing in leading roles. It has taken a while for me to get here, but I'm finally here and I get to be part of the solution that addresses the problem of representation for BIPOC women with non-typical body types getting to be depicted as people who can be desired, have a life outside their waistline, and who gets to be the focus in their own stories and depictions in art/comics.
Lady T.