Minor Moral Dilemma and Inner Demons of Comic Writing Resolved

Just over a year ago I wrote a 9 page comic to submit to my former university's yearly Creative Writing students anthology. It wasn't accepted for printing reasons, or maybe they just told me that to be nice. I decided to continue the project anyway treating those 9 pages as a prologue. For a number of reasons, that project is only recently starting to take shape. One of the changes I'd like to make involves the character Emmanuel, who was originally named Nicolas. You might want to read the story to get all the context here, but basically I changed his name when I realised I'd subconsciously named him after Nicolas Yewdale, a friend of mine who died in high school.



Nic's a friend of mine who died in my final year of high school. Myself and 4 others have matching tribute tattoos to him. I think around 6 others had different tribute tattoos done. Mine is under my right bicep, mirrored to where his Misfits tattoo was. Contributing to his mural is what initially got me into spray painting.

I hate changing character's names. Almost every time I go to mention him in the comic scripts I'll still write Nicolas the first time. I'm now thinking I'll leave the name as it is. It doesn't bother me so much now that this is who the character is named after. It bothered me at the time, because it wasn't intentional, and I don't like the idea of my subconscious sneaking up on me like this. But I suppose things like this are going to stay with me.

The character himself serves as the protagonist's main motivation, which I think is fitting. I'm now happy to have him in the story, now that the name is there on my own terms I suppose.