As most of us SCAD students are only a few years off from our high school days, a lot of the themes of the hit WEBTOON series “First Ones Out” may be all too familiar to us. With nearly 90,000 subscribers and over 4 million total views, its commercial-level quality is incredibly impressive knowing that the entirety of it is written and drawn by 20-year old SCAD BFA Animation junior, Mae Honark.
Honark, who started making the comic in her senior year of high school in 2019, took inspiration from her own experiences as well as other coming-of-age media. In a conversation that I was able to have with her about the comic, I asked her how she felt about the whole process. “Creating ‘First Ones Out’ has made me so grateful that people actually want to read what I create,” Honark said, “I wrote it during a hard time in my life so being able to publish it was quite cathartic.”
The comic itself revolves around a cast of six high school seniors that study at an international school in Bangkok, Thailand, with the narrator being Tulip Rachanon, a 17-year old plagued with insecurities and fears about her future, as many teenagers are. To make sure she passes her math IB, she gets help from mysterious Jamie Dyer, who she may or may not start developing feelings for, but a dark rumor about his past that drove him into isolation looms other both their heads — a rumor that has yet to have any clarity.
We also follow the stories of her two childhood best friends Camila and Sydney who each have their own relationship problems regarding a controlling and possessive boyfriend and nasty ex-girlfriend respectively. Finally, we have best friends Dante and Alec, whose relationship may be a little hard to define between questions of sexuality and aspirations over expectations.
Honark was able to capture the essence of growing up perfectly in a sense that rarely anything goes in the way that you expect, but the way you handle and react to these changes are what ultimately define you as a person. When reading “First Ones Out,” there will always be a little something that you can relate to, which is what makes it so appealing to a teenage and young adult audience. When asked about its popularity, Honark had no expectations about it becoming as big as it is today. In fact, she even considered discontinuing it a few months after the release of its first episode. “I really considered discontinuing the comic in my first quarter of SCAD, because it was really difficult for me to manage adjusting to the college workload and living away from my family. If it didn’t gain traction when it did, I probably would not have gotten as far with it because a lot of my motivation also comes from wanting its readers to see it through.”
Through the course of its current 41-episode run, you can see a lot of technical improvement in the near 3 years that she has been working on it. Stylistically, she said she was inspired by the environment and aesthetics of HBO show “Euphoria” and countless other 2D cartoons and animations from power houses like Disney, which is also what inspired her to take animation. In the future, after the conclusion of “First Ones Out,” she sees herself getting into the animation industry for storyboarding and making even more comics. But for now, we are excited to see where Honark takes the story.
Read “First Ones Out” on WEBTOON and check out more of Honark’s beautiful work on her Instagram @m4eph
