Page 291 (Ch15 Cover)

3 years now. Wow.

It’s insane to think how things have advanced and changed since this comic started. Right now Chapter 15 is in development, MMF joined the Foxglove Comics collective, and hundreds of people are enjoying the work and love poured into this. Also, Chapter 15 will start being posted on October 10th!

I wanted to write a retrospective, and comment about bits and pieces surrounding the history and development of MMF, because there are a lot of things I’d like to talk about.

The beginning

When I started MMF, I was enduring a severe burnout. The pandemic had been going for two years, and depression mixed with exhaustion and RL issues had taken a very big toll. I had already created the characters used in the comic a year prior- My workout routine consists mainly of air drumming on VRChat to rock and metal music, both Rowi and Sher were avatars I own on that platform and I had a loose backstory for them (D's backstory was actually written after the comic had started).

During the beginning of the comic I wasn’t planning on a huge story either. More than that, I just wanted a comic about the characters I had made, something related to something very important for me (music) and I just wanted it drawn and out of my brain. My thought at that moment was that if I decided to bail on the idea of making my own comic, no hard feelings, I wouldn’t feel bad about it, but at least I could say I tried. I was scared of commitment as well. The story was simple: An alien rock band was asked to play for a hidden species who were hiding on a random planet. When the chapter was nearly complete, I was already enthralled and wanted to make more. At the time I was on vacation visiting Germany, and during my walks to a nearby Edeka I kept daydreaming about the band, the comic and more stories to come. I started planning Chapter 2, but in my mind I was already imagining Warfaisser and the big plot regarding the Horkers.

Setting up the rules

At this point I prepared an underlying story idea, but I wanted to do things seriously. I needed a solid foundation for it, so I decided to dedicate at least 4 chapters to set up the universe, its rules, and some side characters that would be important later. Chapter 2 focused on Sher and his family; I wanted to show his parents being flawed but still showing that they genuinely loved their kids. I made them to be the conservative type who didn’t really get or approve of the modern world but were willing to change their opinion/view if they saw that they were in the wrong. A bit like Hank Hill from King of the Hill. But that wasn’t the main influence. I had to prepare lore for the vampire bunny species, and after the idea I had come up with in chapter 1 that Horkers loved vampire bunny meat, the idea came of making vampbuns a shy, nice species who lived underground. Two of the biggest influences for them as a species were Moomin and the Mimigas from Cave Story.

Fun bit of trivia: Originally I was going to have Roi die at the hands of Horkers, giving Sher huge motivation to fight against them. I shelved that idea (I don’t remember why exactly) and I’m super glad I did it; I really like Roi being part of the main cast today and eventually she's gonna get more screentime :D

Anyways, after finishing that story, I moved on to Chapter 3 setting up more rules about the setting and the universe: The band being on Earth, why they went to space, how warp worked, space pirates, etc. I also gave the band a mission that would move the plot forward. Chapter 4 was my biggest chapter (and the longest to date), introducing Rowi’s pack. Since Avali canonically are a pack-oriented species, I wanted them all to be very different from Sher's parents. While Sher’s parents were flawed, scared, old-fashioned, stressed and a bit on the “sad” side, Rowi’s pack was fun, happy, much more dynamic, active and, over all, quirky. During the development of chapter 4 I also knew that in the future Eikomi and D would end up together, and that Rowi and Sher’s families were going to mingle and get together.

The story goes forward

Chapter 5 was essentially a big “wham” episode. It set up Horkers properly as horrible beyond just the single page from chapter 1. I also used that chapter to set up the band’s motivation to go against Horkers, with Sher being the lead on that front. However, Chapter 5 felt “all over the place”, especially after I used it to explain why aliens were common on Earth, and I decided to start tackling plots one at a time from there. So I went with the Warfaisser concert, which took chapters 6 and 7. I used that concert to bring both families together, and I was able to properly showcase Sher’s parents in a way more positive light than I had been able to during chapter 2. By now the topic of the comic was very clear too; deep inside MMF is a comic about Found Family, and about how your families can mix if they’re compatible. These two chapters were extremely important in showing that. In addition, it set up the background for the band getting way bigger than it had been until then; when the comic started they were just a small rock band playing at space stations, and now they were becoming a big rock arena band.

It was around this time that I started learning in more detail what is required to be a huge band like Metallica, Slipknot or so on. I knew that the “old setup” of Rowi, Sher and Rowi (and Mekari) doing everything themselves wasn’t going to hold up for much longer, and thus I decided to add more roadies down the line.

During August 2023, while I was finishing chapter 7, I asked Russet to be my co-writer. He would help me not just in proofreading the story, but he would help me to plan the lore that was going to set an even stronger foundation for everything moving forward. And hell he did that awesomely.

The backstory and bunny lore

I knew what I wanted bunnies to be back in chapter 2 when I wrote Sher’s family. However, Russet helped me to flesh out the vampire bunny lore to a degree that I could’ve never done on my own. Their attitudes, their behavior, the reason for their behavior, their lifestyle, why they hide, why they’re afraid, how incredibly dangerous the bunny planet is, everything. What we planned and prepared set the basis for Sher’s backstory that was covered in chapters 8 and 9. I decided that Roi would visit the UK during her trip to Earth precisely as a reference to where Russet lives, and we even planned ideas for Roi’s stay (that unfortunately didn’t make it into the comic, but who knows, maybe in a future I could touch that topic again). Sher, however, I knew he was going to come to Chile (where I live), to a city I know, where he would learn the essentials about humans and how Earthlings live.

Talirubi, funny enough, is a character that was kind of improvised at the time. Originally I was going to make him be a certain species popular on vrchat, but due to multiple reasons I decided to leave that idea out and make him a personal design. As a friend put it later in Discord, “Talirubi is so adorable but damn he’s an asshole”.

Chapters 8 and 9 essentially explained why Sher went to Earth, his reasons and motivations, and how he met Rowi. After that was done, we decided to move the story forward and finally start doing what was originally planned to happen plotwise.

Where the story stands

One thing that was important about Rowi’s family is that unlike Sher’s, they are rich. Rowi’s family never had (nor will) have any financial worries. They are high in the Avali Pack hierarchy, and that was going to be important for the incoming part of the plot. So we set it up to look like a normal band progression: MMF was getting bigger and more known, and they were invited to play for a certain species. Then we’d put a high stakes plot in the middle, all of a sudden, surprising the readers who, until now, wouldn’t have seen anything like this; MMF had so far been a gentle comic about a rock band and Found Family with no real “risks” in the middle for the characters. This is where the idea of being kidnapped by pirates came.

I think the idea was pulled off well. However, everything was going to be a teaser to move things faster. I made the pirates be good guys, to expand more on how evil Horkers are, and also to put more tangibly why bunnies are still terrified of the “not friends from space”: Horkers are still going to the bunny planet, kidnapping them and taking them back to their king. The rest of the plot so far was to set up how Avali and vampire bunnies ended collaborating together, and pretty much moving Rowi’s family to Sher’s planet permanently as a set up for things to come. We also used a very anticlimactic scene to show that the Horker king isn’t just a cruel brute, but a very intelligent/smart one, something that’s gonna come back up in the future.

This is where the story stands.

Looking back, thoughts

Looking back at each chapter, I can see growth not just about the story writing but also about the scope of said story. MMF started just as an attempt to fight burnout, to have my own personal comic/story that I could work and end at will if I felt like it, and it grew up into something that not only became my magnum opus, but also something that I love dearly. I will always thank Russet for helping me to elevate the story I want to tell into something truly shiny like a diamond.

Things are looking amazing ahead, and I am all up for it. And it looks like we’re not the only ones confident in where this comic can go- We got invited to join Foxglove Comics a couple months ago, we accepted and the reception has been amazing.
Before finishing this retrospect, I want to say three things that I think are extremely important to mention.

1. Always have an “unfinished” art piece that you cannot afford not to finish. This means that you will always have something to strive for, something that you must work on even in your worst days. And when you finish that piece, it’s time to start a new one.

2. Don’t wait until “you’re good enough” to start working on something you love: If you do, you will never start it. It’s difficult for me to look at the first chapter of MMF, because my style wasn’t there yet, but truth be said, only after I started working in the comic I started to seriously improve my style, and I think that shows in the art evolution as the chapters move on. Compare chapter 1 to chapter 7 and you’ll see what I mean.

3. Work on your piece for yourself. This is partially tied to the first point, but this is the thing: You will always get a negative opinion sometime, or people who don't like the story you’re telling or how you’re telling it. Don’t value your work based on what they think about it. You can gather feedback from them, but don’t take what they said as a religious truth. The one you must make happy with your story is yourself first.

That’s mainly it.
I want again to thank everyone for reading, for your comments, thoughts and everything.

Thank you for the support and for liking this! It’s honestly amazing that this has been going for 3 years by now, still going steady and barely scratching halfways through the story. It means more than you imagine.

See you in a few weeks!

• Vic