Renegade Dreams

I'm exhausted, spent all night working on a manga-style comic book called "Renegade".

It was just a dream but since I've done everything in magazine production from coming up with a concept to writing, drawing, typesetting, running the press, binding, boxing, shipping, promotion, selling ads, selling the books themselves and attending the cons -- I was busier than a woman with four husbands and eight sons on Superbowl Sunday.

Renegade was a story about a long-haired blonde boy, Sandy, raised by Indians in the Old West who is sent back to the white people when he is about 12 after the Indians come to understand that they are going to be relocated to a desolate wilderness reservation. Either that or if they fight, they will be exterminated. Sandy isn't happy, he liked being an Indian but if he doesn't go willingly, the white soldiers will probably take him away from his home and his tribe, anyway.

So, off he goes to the area where the Indians found him when he was about five. He's really surprised when he discovers that he speaks English, he'd forgotten that, but he has a hard time fitting in. For one thing, the white people want him to cut his hair and he doesn't want to do that since in his tribe, braves have long hair and it is a disgrace to wear short hair. He stays with an army unit for a bit and then is sent to live with a rancher.

Some of the ranch hands think it is hilarious that he won't cut his hair and they decide that he must want to be a girl and they end up raping him. When he recovers in town with the doctor, they nearly killed him, he goes back and shoots them both, in the back. He's only a kid and they are grown men and this is tactics not cowardice. Then he runs away, planning to find his tribe and that's the end of the first manga arc.

Almost tempts me to try to write it. :)

In the second arc, he goes to another town where cousins of the doctor's family take him in but somehow in the introductory letter, the doctor mentioned the rape but not that Sandy is a boy. Sandy can't read so he did not know this. So they think he is a girl. He goes along with this, thinking at least they aren't trying to cut his hair. He doesn't know how to be a white girl but he doesn't know how to be a white boy either so it isn't any more difficult to do one than the other in a way. Also, he remembers his Indian aunt who was so nice to him back in the tribe. She'd been born a boy but after an injury had decided to be a girl instead.

The one problem is that people are incredibly protective of a girl. After finding a black haired wig in the attic while playing with his cousin, he decides to use it as a disguise and starts going out in the night time as a boy Indian, riding around in the dark and doing mischief to people he things aren't very nice.

There was more stuff but I don't remember it much except he gets wrapped up in a mystery about a murder in Tent Town where the Chinese live. And there's a werewolf or something. :)

Hugs,
Erin