I thought I would share some various notes I had about the comic. Nothing too revolutionary, just rambling thoughts while working on the pages.
I don't have any notes currently for most of chapter one. I started writing these somewhere in the middle of chapter five and needed to make this note about the name change on page 38. I might go back and add some more notes in the future. maybe.
Page 38: Name change: I was procrastinating on officially naming Claire and Ann while drawing the first chapter and then got to the point on Page 38 where I had to. I had liked the idea of using "Tesla" as Claire's first name but thought it might be too much of a allusion to the inventor Nikola Tesla. Honestly, I just liked the name and didn't have any interest in directly referencing Nikola.
Obviously, Tesla has a long history of being used as sci-fi fodder and I didn't think there was much common ground between him and what I wanted to do for the comic. Nikola Tesla's research was mostly about electricity while Xenozoo would be more about aliens, creatures, space and environments. So I figured it would be better to give them a more conventional first name, but kept Tesla as their last. Since then I've considered integrating something into the story to bridge the gap, like having giant Tesla coils or towers with electricity shooting out of them involved in overall story. But doing so seems like trying to bend the story into a direction that it didn't need to go in just to justify a reference to their last name.
Never really being happy with the decision, I decided that I could just change the "L" to a "K" and solve the whole problem. Claire and Ann could have a similar name to my original choice but have their own identity without the reference to the inventor. I've gone through all the pages and changed the instances of "Tesla" to "Teska". I think I got them all, but it's possible that I missed one or two somewhere. I don't refer to their last name very often, so it's really not that big of a deal to change at this point. Also, I don't have a massive readership, so I doubt hardly anyone will notice/care. But I figured I would mention it for those of you who might notice.
(I probably won't be changing it on the webcomicsnation site though. I think I'll just wait for the site to burn itself out.)