Old, familiar faces

I mentioned in my comments section that the main four kids had begun as humans, and someone asked what they looked like. Well, here you go! I did my best to recreate them as they looked then. I've long since lost the original sketches, sadly. (I think I made the right choice in final character designs.)

Way back in 1991, I started drawing a set of characters that would eventually become the Precocious cast. (Then it had a simplistic, obvious and stupid name: Brats.) The main character was a crude avatar of my 11-year-old self, and the rest of the cast was set up to give him something to do. Most important was his meek and bumbling sidekick, a spiky-haired kid named Jacob.

Next to be added was Tiffany, based upon a bespectacled blond named, uh, Tiffany. (I WAS 11, OK!) Within the next year, cartoon Tiff gained a loopy personality and moved away from her inspiration. (Same as how the character who would later be Bud - I've forgotten his original name - eventually stopped being an idealized portrait and became a unique personality.)

The next year, I expanded the cast again. As I had struck out with everyone in middle school, I decided to add a romantic interest for my character. Enter Autumn, a fiery redhead who immediately became more of an equal/rival than a girlfriend. Autumn worked so well, she replaced the other female lead, who has long since been forgotten. (The other character introduced with Autumn gave me pains in finalizing him design - so much that I scrapped him - but he would eventually become the basis for Roddy.)

After getting my group to a solid four, with a few others waiting in the wings, I quit. I was a crap cartoonist and no one seemed to care about the characters. (Well, the original Tiffany had some questions.) I moved my cartooning to INTENTIONALLY drawing my classmates, which also proved vastly unpopular. Maybe cartooning wasn't for me...