Babble

So far, the name Carrie Hartnoll has been bandied about, dropped here and there, but there’s been no indication of who she is.

Most people have assumed that the girl on the banner at the top of this very page is Carrie, but she’s not (well, she is, kind of, but more on that another time). So, who is Carrie Hartnoll?

Well, in a nutshell, she’s the main protagonist of our story, the person around which everything turns. She’s a very down to earth, working class English girl who gets thrown head first into the middle of something that will change the world forever. But who is she, where did she come from?

Let Lee give you a little background on it all first, shall we?

[If you're the impatient type, you can scroll down to the pictures below and see what she looks like. But for those of you who are interested in this nonsense, keep reading...]

My original handwritten story....

Humble Beginnings…

When I originally conceived Babble, it was a prose story, with a male lead. There wasn’t much of a character to him, to be honest; in fact, there wasn’t much of a story around him either, just a handful of handwritten pages that didn’t – and still don’t! – make much sense to anyone but me.

The story got laid to rest for a long time, until I started exploring the world of small press comics. I got in touch with Selina Locke at The Girly Comic, from Factor Fiction, about submitting a short piece. Not having anything already prepared, I quickly wrote a brief outline for a story called Babble, building on what little work I’d done on the original prose version.

To keep it inside the guidelines, I made the lead character female, thinking that it didn’t really matter if the lead was male or female. And so, Carrie Hartnoll was born, not with a bang, but rather a whimper.

However, the more I got into writing the script, the more I realised that it worked so much better with a female lead. In fact, it got to the point where I couldn’t imagine anyone but Carrie Hartnoll as the lead.

The next step was to start breathing some life into her.

It’s Alive!!

In the original short, I had her pictured as a feisty girl, recently single and looking for a new start. Seven pages didn’t give me a lot of space to try and draw her character out in any detail, but I did what I could with it. When I got the chance to re-write the story as a long form narrative, I gave myself the opportunity to develop Carrie more, and try to make her more rounded and realistic.

So, this new version of Carrie became a down on her luck girl who’d gone through a rough patch and hadn’t emerged from the other side any better off.  She was stuck in a dead end relationship, a dead end job that she hated and was just coasting through life, ready to give up and settle for what she had. As downbeat as that sounds, it was sort of mirroring my own life at the time, and it gradually became an integral part of the story. Perhaps more importantly, though, it became a key element of Carrie’s character; it grounded her in reality, made her human, and to compliment that, she needed the right physical look…

Model Building…

When I started to put the script together for the original short, I left the description of Carrie pretty light:

She’s around twenty-eight, with dark hair and bright eyes; she’s dressed like an average twenty-eight year old.

That description carried over into the longer version, too. I had a rough idea in my head of what she looked like physically, but part of me was always scared that an artist would turn her into the usual, generic comic heroine: massive breasts, tiny waist and  legs that stretched on for 17 miles. She was always, to me, a regular, average 28 year old woman, and that was something that I wouldn’t give any ground on. When I started to think about doing Babble as a long form narrative, those original fears doubled. Would I have to turn her into that huge-breasted fantasy figure to make the book more commercial?

Fortunately, when Bryan and I discussed doing this together, I was relieved to discover that we were on the same page regarding Carrie, as his original designs for her will attest:

Bryan's original designs for Carrie

I don’t know how Bryan did it going on such a brief description, but he just nailed my vision of Carrie perfectly. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was the glasses, but we actually hit a compromise: Carrie wears them when she’s working.

Yeah, it’s that kind of behind the scenes gossip that keeps you coming back to this blog…

The Look Is Everything…

So, we had the physical look of Carrie down. Next was trying to decide on her wardrobe.

Again, the key thing was to make her style of dress as realistic as possible. During the story, she was going to doing a lot of running around and maybe some fighting, so high heels and mini-skirts were out of the question (unless we were forced to by a publisher). Jeans and trainers seemed to be the most practical solution, and helped further ground the character in reality.

One thing I was adamant about when I started writing was that Carrie should be wearing a Mod t-shirt when we first see her – the classic target design. When I started this as a longer narrative, I took the decision to reset some of the story to the other side of the Atlantic, purely as a commercial decision, but it soon became a key part of the story. I thought – rightly or wrongly – that the t-shirt design would give the reader a visual signpost, something to indicate that she was English. Of course, I could’ve been more obvious and asked for her to wearing a Union Jack or a St. George’s Cross, but the Mod roundel was more subtle and, frankly, much more stylish.

So, with all that in mind, Bryan sat down to draw and Carrie Hartnoll was finally born into the world…

Carrie Hartnoll

So, there you have it. The Secret Origin of Carrie Hartnoll.