Part 1 of 3:
This comic came together after the Ponycon people were out at Everfree Northwest in 2016. The created a comic about their OC's and we were all absolutely delighted with it. It was a cute, simple story that introduced their new half-whale half-pony mascot.
We thought we would take it a step further. Give the characters a bit more depth, not be afraid to get a little dark sometimes. We wanted something that wasn't just happy and cheerful all the time, instead we wanted to tell an interesting, compelling story with our mascots, but we weren't quite sure what to do with it.
Crowne Prince, Acesential and Jadedjynx were brought together and we brainstormed ideas. There were tons of ideas going around for it and the idea that we settled on was that we would make the story in the comic similar to the story that happened in real life.

Ponycon 2016 was a money pit but we found a way to do it again on a much tighter budget, we moved to New Jersey, we didn't get as many VA's we figured out a way to make it so that even if something absolutely crazy happened, like losing half of our attendees from one year to the next, which had never happened to any pony convention before, we would still make a profit. Which meant we'd be continue on to the next year. We wanted the comic to be something we could continue forward.
Anyway, since we were moving out of NYC we figured Cabbie and Liberty didn't really make much sense anymore, they were extremely New York focused characters and if our con was in New Jersey they wouldn't quite fit. So our idea was that the cute little filly, Bowtie, grew up a bit, moved out to New Jersey, missed running the convention a whole bunch and decided to bring it back but with a different flavor.

Jadedjynx came up with the idea of our new mascot being based on the Jersey Devil. Look it up if you're interested, it's a nice little piece of folk lore. There were many ideas going on at the time between ghosts that would haunt Bowtie to the deer mafia. Yes, the deer mafia. If you didn't give them what they wanted they'd run into your car.
In the end though we decided on having Bowtie, Mirage and Tiebreaker. Tiebreaker was left intentionally uncharacterized in this comic because we were planning on the second comic to be all about him. The idea being that each year we'd base the comic around one theme or another and the three mascots would have to go through their various trials as friends in order to make it all work.

Crowne Prince was the one that fleshed out the story the most. She came up with a lot of the settings, plot turns and characterization. Jadedjynx came up with the character designs and Ace of course helped with all of that PLUS drawing out the actual comic. He's a superstar for being able to do so much work on his own. He laid out the pages, dialog and everything all on his own. He's pretty incredible for being able to do what he did with this.
(It probably helped that I was pestering him constantly about being behind schedule every other day)
We also have a tie in video that gives Mirage a backstory. Crowne did a really incredible job with this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiESPikkbCA


Once we had the idea behind the setting, characters and story it was time to get to work. We decided that we wanted people to get a bit invested into this comic, just like we did. So we started releasing one page per week as kind of a fun thing for everyone to follow and get hyped for the convention. It worked pretty well I think, we ended up with a good amount of people following it from week to week.


In the end I couldn't be happier with how the comic turned out and I can't thank the people who worked on it enough. It was a really incredible accomplishment, especially from such a small team that isn't experienced with this sort of thing at all.