99% of the time, my work centers around human beings. So why is the world of my webcomic Georgia Barker and the Cast-Down Commode! is entirely populated by anthropomorphic animals? There are two main reasons for that.

The first is that using animals makes the story a bit more universal. I’ve noticed that many of the homo sapiens persuasion are quick to distance ourselves from a story or character if they don’t look like us or live like us. I’m not here to debate if it’s nature vs. nurture (unprovoked), but we do get very distracted by it, and sometimes it can determine if we even view a work or take it seriously. The theme of my webcomic is one that can resonate with so many different people, so using animals instead of humans to tell it worked because it removes the “otherness”.

(Ironically, I have drawn the characters as humans just for fun. Maybe one day I’ll show you.)

On a lighter note, making the characters animals was a fun artistic experiment for me! Animals are masters of body language, so I was always thinking of ways to implement that when it comes to how the characters emote and how they react to certain things! For example, dogs bristle up when they get angry, so when Georgia gets mad her hair just goes all over the place and I honestly love drawing it.

And finally, I just have a soft spot for cute animals wearing little clothes and doing human things! I always have. It’s so precious! But I’ll go into that in a later blog post.

Do you prefer stories centering humans or animals? Why is that? I’d love to know.

Thanks for reading!

–RXF