If only there was a word for finding something while looking for something else

Twenty years ago today, I met a girl at tafe named Maya. She just randomly came in from another classroom and started talking to me. At the time I was working on designing characters for a series of comics called Airbury Academy (not at that exact time of course), and I later designed a character based on her looks and personality. 

I called this character Maya even though I try to avoid giving names of people I know to characters. In Maya's first appearance in the comic, she just randomly comes up to the two main characters and starts talking to them. She is also the last character to say goodbye to them in the series' final scenes.
 

As it turned out though, I had misheard when my graphic design teacher told me the girl from the other class's name. I found out a few weeks later that her name wasn't Maya. Phew! Lawsuit averted.

 

Mayday – a forgotten character

Have you ever created a character intended for all kinds of comic strip shenanigans, only for nothing to come of it? 

Back in the late ’90s, I created a character called Mayday. I wanted to do a comic strip with a female lead. I was heavily influenced by the series Æon Flux, which was airing on SBS at the time and which I watched religiously, even though I didn’t understand most of what was going on. I had never seen anything like it before (or since). I wanted a world that matched it in bizarreness, if not in subject matter. I sketched out the character, but couldn’t think of any plots, so I put aside that idea. Not too long after that I got into anime. In 1999 I created a character called Juliet Prime and began making comics and stories about her instead.

Mayday was very much a proto-Juliet. They both had similar designs — short in stature with short scruffy hair. They were also both heroines who were out to defeat a totalitarian. Like the early Æon Flux shorts there would be no dialogue either.

She also had a little walrus who followed her around. The setting was a Soviet-looking brutalist hellscape populated mostly by hominids and itinerant salesmen. That’s all I really remember about this proposed comic strip.

There are no drawings of what Mayday looked like, so I did this mock-up to show you, to the best of my memory. The walrus I coloured purple here because Rotor, the walrus character in the Sonic The Hedgehog comics, was the same colour.

Also, my niece has a little walrus bath toy that is also purple. Coincidence???

If you’ve read my book Freefall O’Malley (and if not, what are you waiting for?!), the above drawing of Mayday might look familiar to you. That’s because she never completely disappeared down the memory hole. In designing the character Anna Yamaha, I (probably unconsciously) borrowed several elements from how I remembered Mayday to look. So she never really went away, she was just floating around in the back of my mind, waiting to be found again.