The setting is the fictional town of Woodland, Massachusetts. But go through a copy of “ComiXscape,” which focuses on a young boy and his raccoon sidekick, and you’ll see hints of the streets and homes of Dorchester.

That’s because the artist, Ludgy Jean-Baptiste, a 29-year-old cartoonist and first-generation Haitian American, based the series on the neighborhood.

“I wanted the environment that the characters are in to just feel like it’s real and to feel like it aligns with the Boston and the Dorchester that we are familiar with,” said Baptiste, who goes by “LJ-Baptiste.”

Two of the places in Dorchester that inspired Woodland are Lower Mills and Savin Hill’s onetime Blessed Mother Teresa School, which he attended.

“A lot of it can be pretty mundane stuff like a street, and showing the houses on the street, or showing the block of Dorchester Ave. when you’re in the Lower Mills area where you see the barbershop, and you see the café that’s right next to it, and you see corner stores, and The Ice Creamsmith,” said Baptiste. “These places I bring to the comic itself. I like that because I like that people who have been to these places can pick out what’s being adapted.”

Baptiste graduated from UMass Boston in 2018 with a major in design and visual communications, which helped familiarize him with the business aspect of the art industry. He taught himself how to draw with the help of mentors, videos, and books.

His career choice perplexed his family in the beginning. “In Haitian culture, people are raised a certain way and they’re made to feel that they should all be doing the same thing to achieve maximum success, and stability, and reach what is seen as their highest potential,” he said. “And in Haitian culture that tends to be either a doctor or an engineer; being an artist is very far from being either of those things.”

But Baptiste remembers drawing since he was four or five years old. He recalls stapling his first comic book together when he was in first grade. “It wasn’t really understood by my family, and they didn’t know how to take it, especially when I would draw on assignments or on classwork and stuff like that,” he said. “So, there was definitely conflict there, but it wouldn’t be something that I could stop myself from doing.”

While in high school, he took a break from drawing comics, beginning again when a high school teacher told him about Artists for Humanity. The organization pays under-resourced teens to learn about art from mentors and different art departments while working on art projects for the city, according to their website.

Baptiste credits the South Boston-based organization with keeping him on the comic book track. “That was part of what helped me continue with the path that I was on with creating artwork, and carving my own path, and getting back to making comics as well, because at that point I was not doing comics like I was when I was a kid,” said Baptiste.

He went on to create the “ComiXscape” main character, Tyler Wesley, and started compiling the series, which now stands at three volumes, with a fourth he hopes to release this year.

The series centers on Wesley and his raccoon Rocky, the friends and enemies they make, and the mysteries they uncover in Woodland.

One of his mentors was comic artist and former art director of DigBoston, Tak Toyoshima, which Baptiste used to read. One day he went to Toyoshima’s office to meet with him, to show him his comic, and to see if he could get his series running in the alternative newspaper. Toyoshima told him about the paper’s online efforts to feature comics from local artists on Sundays and “ComiXscape” went on to regularly appear in DigBoston.

After he amassed a portfolio, Baptiste was able to snag the inaugural teen artist-in-residence position at the Boston Public Library, which ran from February to June this year. During his time there, he facilitated workshops where he taught young people how to draw.

“I was very happy to inherit him,” said Chris Jacobs, the former assistant manager of youth services at the Boston Public Library. “His cartooning speaks to the younger artist. It’s not something a 15-year-old or a 10-year-old would say, ‘I can’t do that.’”

While Baptiste’s comic is mostly inspired by Dorchester, there are other places, like Harvard Square’s Million Year Picnic comic shop, as well as his imagination.

Said Cagen Luse, one of the founders of Comics in Color, about Baptiste: “We’re all influenced by what’s around us, you know what I mean, you write what you know, or you draw what you know. He’s got three books and he’s young. He’s accomplished a lot already.”

Check out more of the artist's work here.