At some point between 2007-09, I had settled on my comic story being set amongst a series of islands, inspired from playing The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker game. It seemed like it would be a good structure for short stories involving a single main character traveling around. The idea of this more anthological storytelling was reinforced from two particular anime series I had watched, Mushi-shi and Kino’s Journey. I later came up with the concept of my main character utilizing bizarre plant life endowed with special properties, and different specimens would be the focus of individual stories. I decided to forego this approach in favor of a more continuous, streamlined story, and to also avoid borrowing too much from Mushi-shi, which remains a tremendous influence on Growtree.
The actual title Growtree came about after I was watching the Futurama episode “Time Keeps On Slippin’” with the audio commentary on. One of the atomic supermen characters, with long stretching limbs, was called what I always heard as Growtree. I had thought that was a really cool name and was bummed that I couldn’t use it, but listening to the commentary informed me that the name was actually Growtreant, taken from a brand of piano apparently. I became energized with this name and knew then that I wanted to use it for my title. With the island setting, it naturally came together that the main setting would be an island called Growtree, named for its founder. This also gave me the idea to have the characters in the story possess similar compound last names, such as Armstrong, Ironside, and Cloudbright.
Visually, I started drawing Growtree Island as a small colony, consisting of small houses and farms all surrounding an enormous tree lying at the islands center. Then, I needed to come up with the people to inhabit those houses.