The Locked Maze is primarily a story about being small and powerless and still saving the world - not through any personal importance or great talent or anything so dramatic, but just by being the only person who could. One night two years ago, Holly didn't die. And that one event led her to save everyone else.
If you have finished the comic, I hope you read the Final Explanation which discusses the ending and what will become of Holly.
Religion
The Locked Maze has a strong message against religious/social/political/racial superiority - any people who believe their side has a monopoly on what is right and good and everyone else is evil and wrong; people who pursue destructive agendas with no concern for anything but their own ideals and desires.
Posted 2011.07.04 0:17 | Last modified 2012.02.08 0:23
Holly got her name from my favorite fairy tale: Mother Holly.
Holly's home burns down at the beginning of the comic and her beloved cat, Nesbit, is killed in the fire. She has persistent nightmares and insomnia in the years following, and is haunted by a recurring mysterious laughter she first heard the night of the fire. But she continues to quietly slog through life, working in Quality Assurance at a technical company in downtown Salt Lake City. Her job is dull and her Mormon coworkers aggravate her constantly.
Jack Lucky (fey)
As many people have observed, his character is based heavily on Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo fame.
He is your stereotypical rock star: always charming, manipulative, witty, and selfish as all hell. He constantly flirts with Anna, but their relationship is entirely platonic, partly because she detests him and mostly because they are more like bickering siblings than anything else. It would just be weird if they ever hooked up. :P
Morgan (fey)
Morgan is drawn from the various triparte goddesses of Celtic and Greek myth. Her age changes at whim, and we see her as a crone (Book I), a teenager (Book I), a little girl (Book II), a young woman (Book II), and a middle-aged woman (Book II). She is the Queen's sister,. She left the Silver Wood after a dispute with the Queen over Thomas and she had not been seen for centuries until Holly came along. She and Anna were very close once.
Kernan/The Hunter (half fey)
Kernan is master of the cwn annwn (fairy dogs) and the guardian of the Silver Wood and the Maze. He lives in a den beneath the wood with his dogs and rarely interacts with the other fey. He is always draped in a gray cloak to conceal his other half from the fairy folk, who find his appearance repellant. He hates the Queen and her court, but obeys her to keep his position, protecting his beloved dogs and the wood.
Anna (fey)
The Queen's daughter and elder child. She is closer to Morgan than the Queen, due to the Queen's obsessive attachment to Thomas and general craziness. She and her friends left the Silver Wood amidst mounting frustrations with the Queen's refusal/inability to do anything to stop the gradual destruction of the Silver Wood. They travelled the human world, but in our story they have settled briefly in Salt Lake City, bored and unhappy.
Anna's Friends (fey)
Please reference their character sheet here and here. They are, from left to right: Lavender, Poppy, Violet, Hyacinth, Tulip, Marigold, and Heron, Crane, Jay, Kestrel, Robin, Martin.
The Queen (fey)
The Queen fell in love with a human man many centuries ago: Thomas the Rhymer. But he betrayed and left her and she has hated all humanity ever since. She spends her time idling at parties and caring for her one joy: her young, sick son, little Thomas. She is worried about the deterioration of the Silver Wood, but there does not seem to be anything she can do.
The Queen's Court (fey)
Please reference their character sheet here and here. They are, from left to right: Aster, Lilac, Violet, Lavender, Marigold, Lily, Dahlia, and Crane, Martin, Mallard, Oriole, Kingfisher, Tanager, Starling.
Violet, Lavender, Marigold, Crane, Martin are Anna's friends who didn't die in Book II.
Thomas (fey)
The son and younger child of the Queen. Thomas is the son of Thomas the Rhymer, a famous paramour of the fairy queen.
Janice (human)
Holly's boss and friend. She is a fellow agnostic/atheist, and although she has little familiarity with Mormonism, she hasn't found her time in Utah very pleasant. She has a young daughter, Katie, and many friends among the working women of Salt Lake City (it's a small group, ha).
Joe & Hyrum (human)
These two are the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of my comic. They are largely interchangeable, although I think of Joe as more emotional and teary and Hyrum as more angry and defensive. They gossip incessantly and talk about religion everywhere all the time, oblivious to anyone else. They have temple screen savers and a constant hum of church hymns playing on their computers.
Grandma (human)
Holly's grandmother dies at the beginning of the comic, on the day Holly's house burns down (although this is not specifically noted until the end of Book II). She figures into the rest of the story only as a ghost.
My real name is Emily Ivie. MLEIV is an abbreviation I acquired when I was a kid (M-L-E I-V). I could have gone with the palindrome EIVIE, but, meh, I liked mleiv more.
Despite being passionate about art from childhood, I have no real training in art (no more than a couple art classes in high school and college). There are almost no artists in my family line, and so there wasn't a lot of encouragement to pursue it. My family is full of writers, though: I grew up surrounded by books, with sisters who wrote nonstop and who loved fantasy as much as I did. I never won any ribbons for art at my high school, but I have a box full of medals from all the literary prizes! (Which should tell you how important it is to be the best writer in your high school: i.e., NOT AT ALL. :P ) All my brothers and my dad work with computers, so I picked that up too, and those skills have proved easier to sell to the real world, even if the work is somewhat less satisfying to my creative mind.
This was my first comic book. My second and current comic book is Rotserarsil: The Wheel.
Influences
My artistic influences include Mucha, Disney, Brian Froud, Michael Whelan, Trina Schart Hyman, Mercer Mayer (Sleeping Beauty), Edward Gorey, and more recently, Mike Mignola. My literary influences can be found here.
Tools
I work on a very old ModBook (a slate-style modified Apple MacBook that has a tablet added behind the screen to mimic the behavior of a Wacom Cintiq) and I use Adobe Photoshop to draw and Adobe Illustrator to letter and lay out panels. At some point I mean to add a tutorial on deviantArt about this, but the basics are that in order to draw on such a bitty screen, one has to become a painter, not a sketch artist. I draw in very rough shapes and then narrow in on the details over time, slowly dropping my brush size and increasing my opacity (and deleting older layers as I go), until I reach a cleanly inked page. Then I go back up to a big brush and low opacity and add the color in using the same process.
