Hawley Students Create ‘Seeky, The Snail’

By Eliza Hallabeck

Rising Hawley fourth grader Sasha Allen visited The Bee’s office on Wednesday, July 14, with a submission she felt provided “humor from a kid’s point of view, not an adult’s.”

Sasha revealed the secrets and process behind creating comics with her friend and fellow cartoon creator Carter Goodrich.

“My friend Carter Goodrich invented the cartoon,” read Sasha’s submission letter, which accompanied a comic detailing Seeky, a snail, trying to blast into space by holding two rockets. “I make the comics and invent Seeky’s expressions on his face, but if it weren’t for Carter, Seeky would have never existed. Please print this comic. It means a lot to me.”

Seeky was born after Sasha and Carter became friends, roughly halfway through their third grade year at Hawley Elementary School.

“We were at a restaurant and [Carter] came up with a little character that was a little snail/worm thing,” said Sasha, “and we called it Seeky.”

It took a long time for the pair to come up with the name, but eventually the name “Seeky” came to them out of the blue. As rising fourth graders, Sasha and Carter have since made roughly 20 Seeky cartoons, according to Sasha.

“Carter sometimes helps me come up with ideas for the comics,” Sasha said. She learned her style of drawing over time and says her favorite newspaper comic is Peanuts.

“Carter was a cartoonist from the beginning, so we started making cartoons together,” she said.

Sasha said ideas can come to them at any time, like while playing during recess at school, and the comic they brought to The Bee was thought up after July 4 celebrations.

Carter said his inspiration for Seeky stems back to second grade, when he started playing with lines to create illustrations. At the time, one of this friend’s older brothers had an overbite, and Carter would later use the older brother to help him draw Seeky’s overbite.

Carter had started to draw different versions of Seeky before he befriended Sasha, but it was not until that friendship that Seeky became what the character he would eventual be.

“I liked the idea of a snail,” said Carter, “and how you could draw him in all different ways.”