Reader Mail: Hardy
Q: Hi Ngozi! I'm a huge fan of your work and I can say with no doubts that you're one of my favorite artists of all time. I live for CP updates hahah! My question is, what prompted you to start developing Check, Please! ? How did the idea come up? Sorry if you've already talked about something like this before! ❤️❤️❤️
This is a great question!
My senior year of college, I took a screenwriting seminar and
wrote a full-length screenplay called Hardy. It’s the story of a
super stoic, brooding, and kinda dumb hockey player who falls in love
with his best friend—who happens to be a dude. I didn’t know much
about hockey at the time, so I threw myself into research. I got deep
in it, fam. And by the time I graduated and had this excess of hockey
knowledge, I knew that I would be heading off to grad school for a Sequential Art MFA.
I figured starting a webcomic would be a great summer project to
polish my drawing skills before my degree work, and also to dump out
all of this hockey knowledge that I had acquired over the last 3 or
so months. Because Hardy was such a dark story, I had actually
started writing about a bubbly pie-baking hockey player in the
margins of my script—just something lighter and more comedy-based.
(Which are the usual narratives I stick to.) So in the Summer of
2013—on a bit of a whim—I drew Bitty sitting in his Samwell
college dorm room for the first time!
Hope that answers your question!
OKAY COOL, I’M GOING SUPER SLOW AT THESE!