Upcoming Webcomic, Entity, Made by AHS Seniors
By Naomi Bloom
STAFF WRITER
A banner created for the comic that features two of the main characters on the right hand side, with a couple of glowy creatures known as entities floating nearby them.
Do you like comics? How about wholesome stories? Amazing character design? Or perhaps… giant chickens? Then Entity will definitely be the story for you.
Entity is a soon-to-be-released webcomic made by AHS students Alana MacKay-Kao and Abby Chou. The story is about a girl named Apollonia (Pollie) Agro, who lives in an isolated but tight-knit community.
The two seniors have been playing around with this idea for a long time. It all started last summer when Chou saw the concept art for Pollie and Zitto, her giant chicken companion, in one of MacKay-Kao’s sketchbooks. The drawing Chou saw is the first one included here.
In the winter, they started discussing it again, and started calling regularly to work on it. They split up the work, MacKay-Kao doing the art and Chou doing most of the script writing.
“I was so unbelievably stuck,” said MacKay-Kao, adding that she wanted to make this comic and she knew the direction she wanted the characters to go in, but she couldn’t figure out how to get the characters’ motivations to come together. But Chou had ideas that resolved every issue and within just a couple of hours.
“It was amazing! She is the organization to my chaos,” MacKay-Kao said.
The two of them agreed they made an excellent team. Chou said that she thinks it’s because “Alana’s always coming up with cool ideas and I have the executive planning skills to make those ideas happen!”
As the two worked more on the story together, they were able to resolve another of the biggest issues, which was how the main characters would act. “I couldn’t figure out how Pollie would act and speak, and I had struggled so much with writing her that I hadn’t even tried writing any of her friends,” MacKay-Ko said. However, after more teamwork on the project, she said “It was like I was watching this perfect representation of exactly how I imagined Pollie being come to life right before my eyes that I hadn’t been able to write myself. It was absolutely magical!”
Speaking of Pollie, “Exploring is her passion,” Chou said. “She knows all the best paths to take and sights to see for miles around, and everyone in the community knows her as the nature expert. After years of leading hiking tours out beyond the city’s bounds, her instincts in nature are sharp, and she relies on them often.”
She and her best friends, Skyla and Sanrin, are about to turn 20, meaning that they will get to transition from school and community service to careers. Pollie can’t wait to start doing nature tours, “until a startling discovery upends her plans and launches her into the adventure of a lifetime,” Chou said.
Chou and MacKay-Kao explained that Pollie discovers there is another entire civilization hundreds miles east of their city, and she goes out to find it. All that hiking beyond the city’s bounds is sure going to pay off.
A banner created for the comic that features two of the main characters on the right hand side, with a couple of glowy creatures known as entities floating nearby them.
They also told ANDOVERVIEW their inspiration behind the title of the webcomic. They decided on the name Entity because in the world the story is set in, there are little semi-sentient blueish, glowy, magical blobs, called entities.
“Not much is known about them, but they’re generally revered in Pollie’s culture,” Chou said. “They can inhabit items and make them move, and when they inhabit certain items they can pull out and show people memories associated with that object from the past.”
Chou and MacKay-Kao both hinted there’s a connection between entities and memories that will be explored later on in the webcomic.
As for the genre of the story, the two of them settled on the “heartwarming” one. “We’re intending it to be generally wholesome and kinda funny, and just fun to read,” Chou said. “There’s nothing dark or spooky or intense or anything. It could also be called fantasy, since it’s set in a different world than ours.”
“This story has grown into something infinitely more fun to make,” MacKay-Kao said. “I think it will be something that we’ll really be able to be proud of!”
They’re expecting to release the first season (several chapters) of this over the summer. They’re planning to have it available on WEBTOON and possibly some other sites as well. To get updates on this and be notified when they post, you can follow MacKay-Kao on Instagram @Sprout4631.
