NinthTale

One day at the close of seventh grade, I was suddenly hit like wind by an quiet but poignant need to begin creating things. I had no idea where to start, but I didn't care. It was just *there,* and all I needed was a pencil and paper to get whatever it was out of my system. Nothing could stop me, and I began to tuck away the things I drew into an old book about dinosaurs like a filing cabinet. I carried it with me everywhere I went—a thin stack of fresh printer paper at the title page, completed works on the other side of the Cretaceous Period. It became a years-long collection of what I would now call absolute rubbish if it hadn't been such an important part of my life. This is that page, characters stolen brazenly (yet somehow only subconsciously) from Chrono Trigger. Dragonball Z became, after Pokémon, the greatest source of influence in my work, and I was possessed by the childlike fantasy that one day I might stand in the shoes of Akira Toriyama when he retired.