Capes-n-Babes

The evolution of a character’s name…
…And how to come up with a strip at the same time.

The other night, my mom was mentioning that she didn’t like Roni’s new hair style. This caught me as being rather odd since I hadn’t actually changed Roni’s hairstyle since her massive “make-over story line” over a year ago.

Then it occurred to me that my mom possibly could have been thinking that the blond vampire was some how Roni and she missed the beginning of the current story line where Marc explains that everything you’re currently reading is a graphic novel Roy wrote and drew a long time ago. So that got me thinking that others might be thinking the same way.

I wasn’t originally going to give the blond vampire a name so soon but it seemed like that might be necessary.

Now, here is where the gist of the blog title comes from…

The blond vampire was always going to be modeled after Lita Ford but I still hadn’t had a specific name for her yet.
I have a co-worker in my office named Lina and so I started to think that some kind of combination of the two names – Lina and Lita – might be a pretty good idea for a first name. That’s how Leena came into play.

Once I had her first name, I couldn’t let go of the fact that I should do some kind of play on “Ford”. Now Roni and her brother both have a German sounding name so I decided Leena’s name was going to be German sounding too. I didn’t want to go with a German version of “Ford” – that would have been too obvious. So, I decided to choose one of the most popular Ford cars around… the Ford Mustang. Maybe there was a German translation for “Mustang”. Google gave me “der Mustang” but there was also other suggestions too. One suggestion said “M