Pablo and Splash are two Antarctic penguins who are polar opposites but besties for life. Pablo is a home bird who loves everything about life in Antarctica - the penguin huddles, the weather and, most of all, his beloved krill pops. But Splash finds Antarctica far too cold and dreary. She’s sick to her flippers of the blizzards and even krill pops don’t hold the same appeal anymore. She wants to see what the world holds for them beyond their icy continent. After much persuasion, Pablo finally agrees to come with her on the holiday of a lifetime, they don’t know where yet, but the goal is sunshine! However, being flightless birds they have no means of transportation. While they are still trying to figure out how to leave Antarctica, they fall through a hole in the ice, through a hidden tunnel, into a secret underground laboratory belonging to a mad scientist called Professor O’Brain, whose specialist subject is time travel. This is where their adventures really begin.
Pablo and Splash all began as a webcomic that I produced during the first lockdown of the pandemic. It was a diary comic with my husband and I depicted as penguins (and our dog as a tortoise, but she didn’t make it into the series). I called it Isolation Penguin and every few days I would put up a new episode to entertain myself and my Instagram followers and to explore and understand better the medium of comics. At some point I thought it was worth taking these penguin characters a bit further as they seemed to work quite well in the webcomic, so I developed the concept of the series gradually and through trial and error. At first I had the penguins stow away with the professor back to her home in Scotland and she had all kinds of complicated contraptions and inventions in her repertoire. But bit by bit I distilled it until it became what it is now. A (hopefully) funny, fast-paced time-travel adventure series with an odd couple as our heroes.
The challenge lay in the sheer volume of drawing…Pablo and Splash is 240 pages of colour art. At first I had imagined that I would illustrate the series in two colours like the webcomic because I felt it would be an impossible task to produce such an amount of artwork in full colour. However, the team felt our penguin heroes needed to exist in a technicolour world and together we worked out a way to keep the artwork simple enough that the artwork wouldn’t swamp me but that the reader would still get to enjoy the full colour experience. It was doable but still quite a challenge to illustrate so many pages…but absolutely worth it! I’m very happy that the series is illustrated in colour now. It’s more fun to illustrate and it’s definitely more fun for the reader.
Fun-filled.
Next Pablo and Splash are off to the Ice Age on a rescue mission and after that our feathered friends visit Ancient Rome.
