I’ve already posted some teaser images that show you that I’m not illustrating a “traditional” witch for Repunzel!Repunzel!. I knew that I wanted to portray the witch in a way that would make it a true monster and not just the classic “woman with a broom”. I did this primarily as an aesthetic choice and, at least initially, there wasn’t a whole lot of thought put behind the design.
When I was working on the writing for the first panel that includes the witch I found myself using female pronouns. I didn’t even notice that I had done it until after I had finished 2 pages! Which brought up the interesting question of if I should leave the gender of the witch alone or neutralize it like I had done with the other main characters.
I asked myself: Are witches always female? I thought through all of my favourite depictions of witches and found that, yes, all of them were female. It’s even included in the definition. Would removing the gender of the character take something away from the story? Certainly not. It seemed obvious to me that this was a perfect example of the kind of thing I wanted to remove from the story so that it was not gender biased. There are a lot of witches (or step-mothers) in the Grimm’s fairy tales and its sad to think how ingrained the image of the evil female witch is in our society.
I must admit I toyed with the idea of leaving the gender specific pronouns for the witch only. As it would have been a way to focus a light on how jarring the gender specific grammar is. Ultimately, I decided to not do this as I would be demonizing one of the genders – which, ya know, is counterproductive to the purpose of the whole project.
So what do you think? Is the gender of the witch any more necessary for the tale than the gender of the protagonists? Do you think that a witch has to be a woman? Let me know!
Tomorrow I’ll be posting page 3!
GRIM 