MI Stuff- Development pt 2 (Patreon)

Oh boy.

Well you can right click for a bigger version of this image. Let me just say, this is probably the most difficult character design I have ever done in my life, and it's coupled with one of the larger rewrites I've ever done as well. All of these images are from 2014... the scene was:  I had been self-employed for about 4 months, had just turned down a (frankly) shitty offer from a relatively well-known webcomic publisher to do their space webcomic. I was laying on my bed kind of mulling over the visual of me dying in a moldy cardboard box in some gutter somewhere (in this visual it is usually raining, and the box isn't even on the nicer end of the box spectrum), and I thought "well maybe I should clean up MY stupid scifi story and actually do it?" The other story and it's general elements had been so unappealing to me, and the elements of this one had been so sort-of in the right direction, that I figured it might be prudent for me to actually get my shit together and commit to launching it in 2015. Of course, this required fixing up the plot.

The previous one, which you can read above, had been about some feelings I respond viscerally to; namely loneliness, longing, nostalgia, etc. But those things are a VERY hard sell unless you are a more nuanced artist, which I am not. I am too much into pulpy crap; stuff like adventure, exploration, action, etc. These are hard to balance with more somber themes; the result can be schizophrenic and unlikable. IDK if any of you read China Miéville but most of his stuff strikes me that way... I feel like I'm enjoying it in the moment, but I usually walk away with a bad impression. The Scar in particular, which also shares some aquatic themes, but just feels depressing and pointless despite all of the fantastical happenings. Anyways, I decided to change tack from the original feel and pursue a more upbeat story with the same basic premise (Mars, big hole, stuff is in the big hole), and this time it would be about my main character, maybe still a bit flawed, falling down this hole and then finding his own inner strength to save not just himself, but the better parts of a marooned race.

The problems: a) this is the plot to Disney's Atlantis, b) this doesn't work with my main soapbox for this type of story, which is that mental illness should not be glorified as some mind-over-matter kind of deal c) it was starting to get too boring, haha. Originally... after The Big Fall happens, the story picks up in Yellow Chamber, one of several chambers sharing a connected sea (the Mare Internum, as usual). Yellow had fallen out of contact with the other colors, and had been the chamber of the artist classes. The story was structured around adventures going through the other major chambers (green/ agriculture, blue/ ? , red/ science, then the finale of black/ war), all the while unraveling the mystery of what had happened to the other chambers and attempting to save the people of Yellow. It was so... sooooo campy haha. I got very tired of writing it after about 3 months, and I began to hate this stupid girl who was starting to unavoidably become a love interest (I really hate love interests). I hated her stupid attractive face and her stupid athleticism and the stupid way she was bolstering this random dude instead of just solving the problem herself. The only things I liked were her hair and her kind of catlike features. "IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO TACK THEM ONTO A SHARK GORILLA" I did not think at the time, but then a year and a half later and here we are.

So yeah, it was October 2014, I was watching my buffer to launch run down, caught in between several huge deadlines and generally completely unprepared for any sort of comic. And I hated everything about my story and where it was going. So naturally I decided to do a complete redesign of this character and rewrite the script from scratch.

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Part 3 probably after we find out some more about newFriend/ armschilla/ Shark-kong in the comic. This is really killing me but I promise I'll post a copy of the first draft of the script for you then too as well, haha. It is so cringey, I know you'll love it.