The Epoch O'Harah is a story/concept I've been working on for a while. It chronicles the surreal and often supernatural misadventures of an eccentric teenager and the various friends he picks up along the way.
This post, and the post following, have been a long time coming. I've been hesitant to post about this stuff on my blog because they are ideas and characters I've been cultivating since my high school days. Like most concepts formed during said years, they didn't start out as particularly worthwhile or compelling, but I felt (and still feel) strongly about these guys, and have always kept them going, in a hopes that I could make good by them someday.
So here, more or less, is the progression of Larry O'Harah and his friends:
 |
| Larry O'Harah, circa 2006 |
In high school, I made these characters to give myself a playground, to just jot down gags and ideas to test out, and to write stories and comics with. I started with an extremely paranoid, curly haired protagonist who always wore a raincoat because he was afraid of clouds, and underneath always wore a tuxedo "just in case". This eccentric young man eventually became the much more confidant Larry. Once I had Larry I started to populate his life with other characters:
 |
| The very cleverly titled "Liphe and Thymes of Larry" |
I wanted to make strange and silly scenarios for Larry and his group to get into. Larry was a member of the Garden Gnome Liberation Front, he'd rope his friend Steve and Steve's cousin Kate into his adventures, they'd meet a sword wielding otter named simply The Otter, they'd thwart the schemes of the littlest demon Scoots, Destroyer of Worlds, and much more.
 |
| Learn a bit more about Larry, now circa 2008 |
As I said before, even if these guys had promise, most of what I produced was either hackneyed, didn't make much sense, or just plain dumb.
 |
| One of many "gag" strips I made, almost daily, during high school |
I wasn't doing much to improve the characters visually, mostly I focused on trying to write funnier jokes, develop better timing and more interesting and or compelling stories. These characters were my playground in that I'd place them in any scenario I saw fit, and over time tried out different ways of drawing, and adding characters along the way.
more and more these characters started finding their personalities, and I started to writing comics and strips. Here is what I deemed the "Leroy Saga", one of the few series of strips I ever actually uploaded online:
And then, once I started college, I put them on the back-burner. I knew they weren't yet good enough, both in aesthetics and writing, to be scrutinized as characters. But I never stopped developing an actual story around them, a world they fit in.
Recently, I've taken to redesigning them, and actually writing something I'd consider as a "pilot" around these characters. Part II will be about just that, and the characters most current incarnations.
