Comic:Emma

From CGWiki

Emma

Slice-of-life, romance, manga/American style comic by Miruku / J.M. Countryman

San Francisco set story about life from the point of view of a 24 year old musician who no longer sees the point in anything, and a 34 year old restaurant owner who never saw the point in the first place.

[[[2]]] <-main site, is prettier than CG site. [[3]] <-ugly comic gen site because I am awful at html.

Current art (not a page): [[4]]

The format of the comic has recently been changed. The eight chapters up until now will now become "Part I," followed by an unbroken Part II and so on, unless the format is changed again. So, here is as brief a summary as I can manage of the eight chapters that encompass Part I.

We start off by meeting Theo and Willem, best friends. Theo owns a restaurant but it looks like he won't be able to keep it in business much longer. Theo heads over to a bookshop where our main character, Emma, happens to work, and where she happens to bring her cat, Keslar, quite often. We also meet Theo's overbearing sister, Alicey, whose husband is apparently never home and whose daughter is way too much for one woman to handle.

It turns out Alicey's daughter, Annie, could do well with a few violin lessons, and through a mutual acquaintance, Emma, Alicey, and Annie meet. It doesn't go well and then Theo shows up to make it worse. He asks Emma to play at his restaurant at the siggestion of Will, but doesn't think ahead to know that she would need to be paid. The lesson is given up and Emma goes to meet Will, whom she met and had coffee with earlier that week.

Will works at a concert venue and has given Emma one of his free tickets for the evening. He has to work, though, and thus leaves her alone to be discovered by Theo, who Will gives pretty much half of his free tickets to. Emma and Theo get into another little tiff which results in something of an apology and a plan for Emma to play at his restaurant the next week.

In the meantime, Emma spends the weekend at her uncle's place out of town. She accidently meets up with her former roommate, Marissa, and they have a fight. Her uncle, Brody, sets it up so that they also meet up with her ex-boyfriend, Jeremiah, who she doesn't want to see. Overall, the weekend kind of sucks, except that Emma at least had someone to talk to other than her cat.

Back in San Francisco, Emma's gig at Cafe Ilena, Theo's restaurant, has gone reasonably well, aside from both her and Theo lacking social graces. In Emma's attempt to leave the restaurant, Theo insists on walking her home. Upon seeing her rather expensive house, however, he starts to wish he hadn't been quite so insistent. Cut to Theo bitching to his sister about "that violin girl" and some further vague mention about Theo's romantic past.

A few days later, Theo goes into the bookstore Emma works at without remembering that she worked there. She catches him looking at romance novels, though he denies it and insists he's looking at Sci-fi for his brother-in-law. At the front counter, it seems panic has made him forget completely that Emma worked there and he is vaguely accusatory. Again, they part on bad terms. Later in the week, Emma goes out with Will and complains of being lonely. She attempts to pick up a guy, but is flagrantly rejected. She then gets very drunk and Will walks her home.

An unspecified amount of time later, days or weeks, Emma comes home from work to find her ex-boyfriend on her front step. She's angry but lets him stay for a day or two. He meets Will and tries to stake his claim on Emma, but Will isn't easily intimidated and honestly isn't really listening.

Titles and meanings:

Part I: "Isolamento"Italian for "isolation"

Ch. 1 : "Movement 1: Introduction"

Ch. 2 : "Movement 2: Lament" musical term meaning a slow tempo, as well as "to mourn"

Ch. 3 : "Movement 3: Andante" musical term meaning "walking speed"

Ch. 4 : "Movement 4: Collegato" Italian word meaning "connections." the musical term would have been "legato" which means "connected," which didn't quite have the right meaning

Ch. 5 : "Movement 5: Recapitulation" Musical term for the portion of a piece of music in which the original theme is brought back in the original key after introducing new themes and keys.

Ch. 6 : "Movement 6: Exposition"musical term for the portion at the beginning of a piece which introduces the main thematic material

Ch. 7 : "Movement 7: Subito"musical term meaning "suddenly"

Ch. 8 : "Movement 8: Mezzo Addormentato"Italian for "half asleep"

Part II: "Presenza"Italian for "presence"

Major characters

Minor characters

Background

While writing this thing I realized how damned specific I have made my characters' biographies. And no, it's not spur of the moment. I've been working on Emma, in my head, since February 2005. It started because I was sick of trying to make something monumental and then just turning it into crap. So, instead, I decided to do something simple and do it really well.

The plan was to do a simple shoujo manga. Then I decided to base the plot off of ::ahem::certain daydreams::ahem:: I have randomly made up while sitting in class being bored over the past 3 or 4 years. But I didn't want it to be exactly the same because 1. that would be weird, and 2. it wouldn't make that good of a comic. I asked my roommate to help me figure out some of the finer points of the basic plot, and thus I began Emma.

Somewhere along the way my happy little shoujo manga turned into a much more meaningful story. As hard as I tried to steer away from that path, Emma became more and more similar to me, both in personality and in her life (no, my parents are not dead, thank goodness, but there are a lot of other things) and Emma became a study of both myself and the world around me; mainly the relationships in that world. Perhaps I could say Emma is the story of my life in an alternate universe...

Links

[5] <-my devart site [6] <-great screen tones for free XD [7] <-best place to find character names EVER