It's Anne Quess again! This is how a person would look if you shot them from the top with a wide-angle lens. I'm going to try to draw a less exaggerated top-view soon.

For now, I find that this is a good opportunity to explain the much-repeated history of how Anne's character was created.

Since the conception of ZnarfMan (the comedic antecedent story that eventually evolved into Purelight), she had always been the central female character, though originally obscure and unnatural in personality. In other words, she wasn't a very realistic person. Reading the old story, I noticed that she was the characterization of the idea of a perfect girl as a nerdy grade school boy's mind in the late 90's could imagine... plus she can wear high-tech combat armor, wield lightsabers and shoot laaazzers!

Her character was inspired by my friend's grade school crush, whose identity on one hand, had to be kept secret back then, and on the other, could not possibly persist past grade school. Therefore, her identity, even in ZnarfMan, had to be concealed: and I did— with the help of hand-drawn black censor bars labeled [AHEM] and [????] which I placed whenever she had a line of dialog.



The funny-spoofy-corny-dramatic story that was once Znarfman took a slow turn towards seriousness (and emo-ness) over the course of a couple of years, and this meant a lot of things. I had to change character designs, which was natural with the developing of my drawing style. I had to change the storyline to adapt ideas and entities that did not come from games and anime on TV. I had to change characters, remove some, combine some, and eventually, name the important yet unnamed character, [AHEM].

The name "Znarfman" is retained as the name of a military conspiracy, and Purelight takes its place as the title of the story. As for [AHEM], what better name could there be for a character who was always referred to as [AHEM] and [????] than Anne Quess? (okay, don't answer that. I know it's corny and that there are worlds better names than "Anne Quess"... but that's how it went. :p)

what? you didn't get it?