Reminiscing on Rovender Kitt (part 1)
I suppose this entry title may seem premature. It should probably read “Realizing Rovender Kitt”. After all, it is a little early to reminisce about a character which you’ve likely only met this past year in The Search for WondLa; but Rovender – the roving wanderer – has been traveling through my imagination for over a decade. For me, he has been a driving force behind these stories, reappearing in my life on-and-off since I first sketched him back in 1996.
Like many of my stories, the inception of WondLa began as sketches. I was thinking fondly of Jim Henson’s fantasy films, fairy tales, and the visions of French artist, Jean Giraud Moebius. From this inspirational pool came a character simply called “The Traveler”. This first drawing came to me while I was still working on role-playing games, like Planescape. And you can see in the drawing above, shapes and forms similar to the characters I had designed for that game. But there was something more to this sketch, something alive. This was a character I yearned to construct a world around.
Over the next year I worked on a myriad of freelance projects and began to seriously develop the manuscript for my first picture book, Jimmy Zangwow. From time to time, I would revisit the story of The Traveler in my sketchbooks. I started to craft a fantastic alien landscape for him to explore. I realized that this Traveler was some sort of alien himself. And yet, despite his alien-ness, he was someone I was sympathetic to. Perhaps it was his searching for his place in the universe that echoed my own yearning to find a niche for my creativity.
As I began to understand who this character was on the inside, I tried to figure out what he looked like on the outside. My first attempt was an extremely alien being, as seen in the pen & ink sketch above.
But that form was too bizarre and I returned to a humanoid figure. This time I infused it with some of his personality. I wondered what it would be like if this character was frustrated, moody and not an easygoing wayfarer. This certainly reflected my own frustration at the time as I labored to break into children’s publishing.
In Part 2: Edgar Rice Burroughs helps me out.
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Have you ever read Russell Hoban’s The Mouse and His Child? The character of the Frog, an itinerant who carries all kind of odds and ends that he sells, made a big impression on me. I’ve always like that kind of character, and Rovender Kitt reminded me a lot of the Frog.
Yes! I totally forgot about that character, Joshua, but I loved that book when I was a kid. The Mouse & His Child is definitely in my writing DNA.
YES! ROVENDER POST!! I love the variations in these designs, but how you can see that they all lead up to the same character…
It’s really cool to see how, regardless of how much all of these early pictures vary; you can still see how they ended up the Rovender we all know and love.
He sort of reminds me of one of my own characters.
Not in looks, but in spirit.