Just the FAQs, ma'am...The History of Tonja Steele. Like I care. So. I’ve gotten enough questions about this comic to warrant a history. My grandma’s a curious person. What better place to air all my dirty artistic laundry than on the Internet. So. I said that. Everything you wanted to know about Tonja, Mindy and the gang, but really didn’t care about. How’d all this start? I’ve been drawing my whole life, like most artists, but didn’t really get interested in cartooning until I saw The Little Mermaid way back in high school (Vanessa, Julie’s sister, was named after Ursula’s human form. Other similarities were not intentional, of course). I was immediately enthralled in animation, more specifically, cartooning. I started out like everybody else does: by drawing somebody else’s characters. Anyway, one day my art teacher noticed my cartooning, and told me to get my own characters instead of copying someone else’s. So, I did. I came up with this idea about a blonde guy who gets marooned on this desert island with a bunch of natives, which included a white tiger who was afraid of mice, and a tough little bronx looking mouse. It was pretty stupid. I gave up on it quickly and took up script writing with Brandi, one of my buddies. We both liked watching animated movies, but we also had a really dark sense of humor about them. Who Framed Roger Rabbit could throw a bunch of animated characters together from different movies, so why couldn’t we? So, we wrote a script for this weird cartoon crossover. We had it all done, when we realized, "Hey! There’s sort of a bunch of copyrighted characters in here that would get us in a heap of crap if we ever decided to print this!" So, it was my mission to make all the leading characters human. And Tonja was born. Well, almost. The thing is, Tonja and Mindy weren’t even in the original script (by the way, this script I keep referring to is the script for the first storyline of the books, which you haven’t even bought yet, I’d bet.).
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