Happy Birthday

A cute comic strip featuring 5-year-old Angela, who visits an amusement park to celebrate her best friend Bear Bella's birthday, only to encounter a surprising turn of events...and something unexpected happened...

Character Design

Angela is a 5-year-old girl who’s quiet and shy most of the time. Since Angela’s parents are busy working all day long, little Angela often has to face an empty room alone.

Bear Bella is another character in my story, the most popular character designed and introduced by an amusement park. She’s a brown bear with a pink bow on her head. She was designed to bring joy and happiness, so she shows her kindness and positive energy to others all the time. She loves everyone and everyone loves her. As the hottest star in the park, it is also undoubtedly true that the park makes most of its money by selling merchandise, like toys, notebooks, hats and bottles featuring the Bella character.


Sketches

Background Story

When Angela was three years old, her parents gave her a toy Bella for her birthday. Little Angela immediately fell in love with the toy bear. As she grew up, she collected more and more Bella themed items in her bedroom, trying to fill the whole room with all kinds of things featuring Bella. Besides, instead of making real world friends, she prefers to talk with her precious bear friend, who can always cheer her up and comfort her lonely heart. They have meals together, sleep together, and hang around together. Bella is like a match lighting up a dark corner in Angela’s mind. As time goes on, Angela begins to believe that Bella is a real world living creature. . 

The story happened right before Bella’s official birthday, June 13th. Angela had never visited  the amusement park before, but despite  her great resistance, her parents finally decided to take her to see Bella and celebrate Bella’s birthday. Angela had  a great fantasy about this big day. She dresses herself up like a princess, and prepares a jar of paper stars she made as a  birthday present for  Bella. It took her weeks to make the paper stars, and Angela even wrote notes to each of the stars  expressing her love for  Bella. The most important thing in her plan is giving this jar to the real Bella on this day. 

At the theme park, Bella is usually performed by a worker named Sam, an employee of the amusement park. He’s 35 years old, but he’s losing his hair. He’s single and has no children and his daily job is to put on the costume, and act like friendly Bella, and interact with people in the park. It’s worth noting that the costume was made of cotton, which makes the inside of the Bella suit super warm. The story happens on Bella’s birthday, which is a warm and sunny day. Sam easily gets sweaty and dehydrated during the hot summer day while he’s working. So the first thing after finishing his work and going back to the staff room is to take the suit off and breathe some fresh air. When he takes off the head of the bear costume and exposes his face in the cool air, the next moment he hears some noises like something has broken behind him. It’s from the broken glass jar, as well as the sound of Angela’s broken heart, because Angela eventually knows the truth that her bear friend is actually played by a human being. 



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