In which Miss Vanessa Lang fights the robots and is saved by a flying bottle.
Vanessa Lang first appears in the annals of Scwonkey Dog history when I’m in grade school. I remember thinking about her in her earliest incarnation while I was standing in the old Westside Elementary School auditorium/lunchroom, though I can’t be sure whether I was actually attending Westside at the time (1st grade) or there for some function while my sister was attending (at late as 3rd grade). I’m not sure why all the “human ally” characters wind up being girls. Part of it has to be that I just hate drawing female dog people, so the girls wind up being human. Ninja Turtles might be an influence here. Also noteworthy, most of my friends in second grade were girls, and heaven knows I always had problems with the boys who were ostensibly my friends in grade school.
Vanessa’s current character design came to me in high school. I know it was in high school, because I remember having a copy of it in the Scwonkey Dog notebook I carried around with me all through high school. The first color copy of it was done on the computer with Photoshop; the colors, of course, reference ZapStar’s color scheme. I keep messing with her hairstyle; you’ll notice over the coming pages that I was finding it difficult to keep it consistent, so it changes in chapter 3. It may yet change again later.
