A lot of kids have had rough days at school. A lot of kids have grown frustrated with their parents. A lot of kids even wished their parents would just go away sometimes. Thankfully, not a lot of kids have the magical heritage to make those outbursts reality.









Oddly Normal is a green-haired, pointy-eared 10-year-old girl whose mother is a witch from a magic land. When Oddly wishes her parents away on a particularly rough birthday; no trace of her parents or her house remains. With the life she knew gone, her grandmother takes Oddly to Fignation to uncover what happened.





“The character came to me one day in 1999 when I was just drawing in my sketchbook," explains Oddly's creator Otis Frampton. "I drew a sad little girl holding a teddy bear and I wrote the words 'oddly normal' next to it. I don't even remember why I did that. The idea of a girl named Oddly Normal started percolating in my head, and the story started forming about a girl who was too odd for the real world and too normal for fantasy land.







“My love of stories of fantasy lands started taking over; I'm a big fan of Wizard of Oz, Chronicles of Narnia and The Phantom Tollbooth. I had the idea of a girl who was sort of of-two-worlds, mixed parentage so to speak, with a mother from fantasy land and a father from the real world, and the story sort of worked itself out from there.”







“Oddly Normal” began as a webcomic, where it was found by the art director of Viper Comics, who offered to publish the story as a mini-series.







“The webcomic basically encompassed what was the first issue of the Image series. Viper offered me, like they offered everyone at the time, a four issue mini-series, which forced me to truncate the first major story arc. I did a follow-up mini-series, and a third was never actually published because Viper sort of went under financially.”







“I've always wanted to redo it. I was never really happy with how it turned out. I wasn't a very good artist at the time, I had to, basically, take what will be 300 pages in the Image series into about 100 pages, and so I lost a lot of the subtleties and nuance that I wanted to do, but it's ultimately more about me as an artist.”







Frampton was committed to bringing Oddly back, trying various avenues, including having a literary agent shop the book around to traditional publishers.







“It was January of 2014, I was working on the web series again thinking it would be a series of long graphic novels. I had the first two chapters done and I printed those up through KaBlam! Printing I decided on a whim to send it out to comic publishers to see if any of them would be interested. I heard back from my top two choices, which was a great problem to have.







“Ultimately I went with Image because of complete ownership for me for my title. It was also a personal choice. I was into comics as a kid, but when I got into high school I kind of got into theater and film. When I was in community college, I got back into comics and I walked into a comic shop one day, and it was the week that Spawn #1 had come out, and it sort of propelled me back into the world of comics. Getting picked up by Image is totally a dream for me. It was an Image comic that got me back into reading and drawing all those years ago.”







To date, 10 issues, which have been collected into two collections have been completed. Moving forward, the story will be told exclusively as a series of graphic novels, as the book format is reaching a significantly larger audience in comic shops as well as book stores, where it is shelved in the children's section rather than with other graphic novels.







“It's an all-ages book, so it's sort of geared more towards the demographic that is used to reading comics in book form nowadays. The Scholastic Book Fair has had a huge influence on how kids read comics because they pick up books like the 'Amulet' series or 'Smile,' and they're used to digesting comics that way. It's an unfortunate reality that kids don't read a lot of single issues these days. Best-selling titles in the single-issue format are usually attached to an existing property like 'My Little Pony,' so it's tougher for an unknown indie title like 'Oddly Normal' to get ahead in that market.







"I feel really good about bringing Oddly back at this time, and I'm really happy being at Image because they've been really supportive. There's some things happening next year, that are going to be even more helpful about the series, so I'm looking forward to 2016.”







Among the movement is that the story was optioned last year for development as an animated TV series. While little can be said at this point, Frampton is optimistic about sharing the story that he has carried within him for so long.







“When I started it, I didn't know where the story past the first major story arc. One of the benefits of having lived with this story for about 10 years now, since the original Viper series came out. I've had a lot of time to think about it. I've got the first three major story arcs already scripted, mostly scripted because I'm basing them on existing stories, and I now know what the ending is. I didn't always plan it to be this long story, but it's definitely grown and I've had time to think about where it might go. I'm now doing the stories that I've always wanted to do for the series as it's built over the years.







“Even after I printed the first four-issue series at Viper, I had no idea how the story would end. It wasn't until I started thinking about some things that happened in that first series that I started to realize that this happens and that happens, and maybe I do know how it ends. I didn't have the ending until after I finished the second story arc. I don't mind writing stories blind, sometimes it's better to write things and let the story grow.”







Frampton anticipates 75 to 100 chapters to finish the story. “It is a finite story. I know how it ends, but I don't have the last story arc completely figured out, but that's part of the fun of it. I'm looking forward to figuring it out.”







Frampton draws influence from every storytelling medium, but is still most impacted by film, naming “Kiki's Delivery Service” as an influence on 'Oddly.' Comparing mediums allows Frampton to evaluate what appeals to him and how to avoid certain pitfalls.









“Artistically, I'm influenced by lots of different things that you probably wouldn't see in my artwork. Probably my favorite comic creator of all time is Frank Miller, and I don't know that anyone would say, 'Oh yeah, I can see that in your work.' It's a combination of the energy of his work and the visual storytelling. There are other influences that people say, 'OK, I can see that.' Jeff Smith from 'Bone' is a huge influence. More recent influences include Kazu Kibuishi, the creator of the 'Amulet series,' and Skottie Young. 'Peanuts' comics were the first comics I ever read as a kid. My dad had these paperback collections, so Charles Schultz is also an influence.”





That diversity of interests and influences helped Frampton land a long-running job working on the animated “How It Should Have Ended” series.







“Daniel Baxter, the creator of 'HISHE,' was doing the artwork and animation himself for, I think the first four years of the series, and in late 2010 he emailed me and said that he followed me on Devianart and that he liked my work. At that time, I had been doing private commissions for people, and I was pumping out a ton of work, and it was all sort of film and TV-based, so he knew I could do that kind of work. He emailed me and asked me if I would be interested, and four or five months later, he and his producing and writing partner Tina Alexander asked me to join the team, and I've been working for them ever since.







“I had actually just become a fan of the series right before Daniel emailed, so it was this weird coincidence where I had just discovered the series and was loving it, and then Daniel emails and asked me to help out. It's been a fun job to have, and helped pay the rent, and it's been a stress-free job. I've only been asked to change one thing in all the work I've ever done. Daniel asked me to make Egon's nose bigger in the 'Ghostbusters' short. It's been a relatively stress-free job.”







Another ongoing project is the geeky alphabet cartoons “ABCDEFGeek,” which were recently picked up by Teefury for a full line of shirts.







“I was doing a balrog commission for a long-time client of mine, and just for fun I decided to make it a cartoony baby balrog and put the words 'B Is For Balrog' on it to make a joke out of it. It got a good response and thought 'This is fun. Maybe I can do more of these.' I started doing them and it became a regular thing, I'm working on my third volume now.”







“Originally, Teefury did six t-shirts to kind of test out the market, and I guess it did okay, because they came back and said, 'Hey, we want to do a whole alphabet.' Now if you want to wear a geeky alphabet t-shirt, you can go to Teefury and get any letter. I've also done a couple of animated shorts on the 'HISHE' YouTube channel based on 'ABCDEFGeek.' I'm supposed to be doing more, it's just the matter of finding time to finish them.”







While Frampton continues to work on “HISHE” and “ABCDEFGeek” and has a plan to write comics for other artists, “Oddly Normal” takes up most of his time, and after living with the story for so long, he is eager to share it and grow his audience.







“The creation of an indie comic, when you're doing everything yourself—drawing, writing, coloring, lettering—is time consuming. I do have a colorist that I work with, Tracy Bailey, she does between three and five pages per issues starting with issue 5, depending on what work I can give her, but it's still a lot of work to pump out an indie comic.







“I do at least one 'HISHE' short a month, usually just backgrounds, because I have very little time to do that work, despite the fact that it's one of my major income sources. I try to get all the work done in a 2-day period, so I'll stay up for like 15 to 18 hours just pumping out stuff, so that I can get back to the comic work.







“'Oddly Normal' really is my main focus and my passion project. It's the one that I hope will keep going for a long time, and I've managed to find ways to make that happen despite it not being the primary money-maker in my life right now. That's my main focus, and hopefully it will be for a ways to go. A lot of things are happening right now, and I feel 2016 will be great year for Oddly.”