Think Twice! was my second entry for the SMA. You can read it here!

Think Twice! Behind the Scenes

Think Twice! was my second entry for the Silent Manga Audition. It’s a simple, 12-page story showing a boy trying to find a girl who runs away after he gets mad at her.

I began drafting ideas for the story just after the end of the first audition in 2021. Initially, I wanted to focus on the theme of fear, so I came up with the story of a boy looking for his sister after she disappears into a haunted mansion.

This is where these characters come in: a tentative boy protagonist and his sister. I wanted the mood to be dark and cool, and so went with an aloof-looking boy.

Other ideas I had involved the villain looking like a large, sinister stuffed bunny residing deep in the mansion. However, repeated testing of this idea on paper proved fruitless, so I shifted the ideas around until I was satisfied.

One day, I drew our current protagonist out of context. He still carried the “cool” look of his predecessor, but seemed a little younger and less sure of himself. I liked that combination, so I began working around him.

In the end, I kept the idea of “boy goes searching for his sister,” but after showing it to my family, we decided “love” was a better description of the events than “fear.” I altered the ending events with their help and, voilà! Think Twice! was born! The title insinuates that the boy regrets his hasty reaction, and that by the end he would realize how precious his sister is to him. The hope was that readers would sympathize with one of the siblings.