What is Time Quest?
Time Quest is a comic series project I’ve been working on since 2017. Time Quest is about two high school freshman, Sierra and Cristine, going on time travel missions and saving the world. They will also meet and befriend two girls from the year 1994 (Renée and Melissa), three girls from the year 1985 (Kristen, Mallory, and Genevieve), and two girls from the year 1976 (Mei-Ling and Bonnie). Not only will Sierra and Cristine befriend them but they will actually work together to save the world. It will kind of be like a magical girl story but with time travel and romance added to the mix as well. It’s really a lot of things at once!
Who is the target audience?
Originally it was going to be geared towards tweens and younger teens but I decided to change it to teenagers and adults. It will basically be a PG-13 comic. Given that this is a story involved with history I just didn’t want to have to hold back to some serious topics I wanted to express in this story. Not that you can’t give social commentary in cartoons for kids. You absolutely can. But with an older demographic, it’ll be easier to dive into things like being in the LGBTQ+ community, generational poverty, healthy and not so healthy relationships, stuff like that.
How did I Come up with Time Quest?
The idea of making a time travel comic started some time in 2014, around 8th grade. I was watching a lot of anime at the time so it was originally a manga style comic set in Japan. That was the very first version of Time Quest. The problem was, I was an American who had never been to Japan. Doing such a story would require a lot of research to make it accurate. Not only that but it would have to be historically accurate to what Japan was like in the 90s, 80s, and 70s. By the time I was a high school freshman, the project was abandoned.
When I started high school in the mid-2010s, there was a cartoon renaissance. Cartoons such as Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, We Bare Bears, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and even the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic were gaining a lot of popularity. My all time favorite cartoon during my first two years of high school was Star vs. the Forces of Evil. It was a story about a magical princess from another dimension, Star Butterfly, fighting evil with her friend Marco. It really was a huge inspiration to bring back Time Quest. I wanted to make a story centered around two high school students traveling through portals the difference being that they only travel to other time periods rather than other worlds. Another big thing I wanted to do was portray an accurate story about high school life and have the characters themselves feel like they could be real people.
The modern version of Time Quest was officially born in 2017 and the rest is history…literally
Here are links to each profile of the main characters and main 90s, 80s, and 70s characters
Cristine Blaire - present day
Sierra Cunningham - present day
Renée Thompson - 1994
Melissa Cortez - 1994
Kristen Anderson - 1985
Mallory Basmajian - 1985
Genevieve Wilson - 1985
Mei-Ling Chen - 1976
Bonnie Simmons - 1976