Those who know the Nuibie universe only through the comics “One day like that on Nuibie” and “Nuibie College: Welcome to Nievicila!” must be surprised at such longevity, the first comic dating back to 2021, and what can we say about those characters seen in this drawing! Apart from Carelle Scandiberrie (in her adult form), there’s nothing but characters absent from our comics here! Although, the central character, below Carelle, may remind you of Spinaco Macalita, who appeared in “One day like that on Nuibie”! But that’s all…
So, introductions are in order! Before becoming a universe of comics and drawings, the Nuibie universe had previously been created for a video game project, Astral Masane, centered on the character of the same name! The project, led by my friend Blady and myself, was very loosely based on another game we’d both made, “Super Thomas Galaxy”, where we replaced the first three bosses, who totally infringed copyright, with 100% original creations: Colola Coke, a character from my very old comics that I’d drawn in felt-tip pen as a kid, Panteuy, a “mecha” led by a hursian, and Carelle Scandiberrie, who was incidentally the very first female antagonist I’d created. These three new characters are joined by the “survivors” of Super Thomas Galaxy, albeit destined to be redesigned: Christophane of Shitty colours (Christophane le Merdicolore in French), a parody of “Saruman of Many colours” from The Lord of the Rings, creator of all the monsters in the game, who is the loyal right-hand man of the story’s great villain, The Great Baste (Le Grand Baste in French), a parody of the “Pope” from the Saint Seiya manga. Both Christophane and The Great Baste are also caricatures of old YouTubers, so it’s safe to say, at some point, there were humans in the Nuibie universe! 😛 And finally, the (yellow) icing on the cake, there’s Astral Masane, who’s the hero of this completely delirious space adventure.
As I said, Astral Masane was a “project”, and never got beyond that stage. It underwent laborious development from 2013 to 2016, several resets, including one in 2015 that resulted in drastically shortening the game, removing the last two worlds, which de facto removed Christophane and The Great Baste. 🙁 At the same time, Blady and I were both smitten with the universe we’d created around the game, so we started dreaming up little stories around these characters, some of which we’ve kept scripts for to this day! There was, for example, a story about Masane’s birthday party, or another about Basile (yes, I’m talking about the same Basile/Zile who’s in Nuibie College) being kidnapped by Carelle, with a Stockholm syndrome to boot. In short, our characters were inspiring to us. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop the split from happening in 2016. Blady announced that he wanted to abandon the game, the universe and the characters. Unable to continue the game without him, and in any case more at ease creating stories than making a game, the Astral Masane game project died at that point.
Some of you already know the rest: after a first short story published on DeviantArt, followed by an unfinished comic strip featuring Masane as the hero, I finally abandoned the Masane character to refocus on the rest of the Nuibie universe. After hesitating for a long time about the new central character, I decided, on the advice of a fleeting contact during the year of our Lord 2020, to focus on a hitherto secondary character, Cassandra, who was developed considerably for the occasion. After which, the characters were rejuvenated to the pre-adolescent stage, and the result is Nuibie College ! Masane, meanwhile, is set for a second life in the near future, as Blady has returned to video game development, and intends to reconnect Masane with what it was created for in the first place: video games!
Anyway, for this eleventh anniversary, then, I did a daring drawing, taking over the protagonist and all the antagonists from the original Astral Masane project, but with my current drawing style. And frankly, as it stands, I couldn’t have done a better job of celebrating Masane’s eleventh birthday, which is also the eleventh birthday of the Nuibie universe! 🙂
Técé