The Red Muscle, 5 years later (Patreon)

Hey guys! August 9th is the 5 year anniversary of The Red Muscle's first chapter being released and I've wanted to do a few things to celebrate the milestone.

I'll save my thoughts on what working on the comic means to me for another post next week (along with a fun illustration I'm working on), but I wanted to spend some time today showing where the comic came from and what I was looking at and thinking about. Also, attached at the very bottom of this post is a PDF of the original pilot. It used to be on itch.io, but I don't think it's a good representation of what the comic is now so it's only going to go up here on patreon for those that already like The Red Muscle. I thought to make this post just for patrons but I really want to share my development and where a lot of my ideas came from in the early stages, so I'm going to make it public!

Scarlet was a design I originally thought up in 2015 because I wanted to make my own fighting game. Some things never change, huh? She was originally meant to be a character to fit the really buff aesthetic of my main in melee, Captain Falcon, and use the feelings i got when I looked at the sprite art from the Marvel vs Capcom games. Particularly Captain America and Cyclops for their proportions.

It was actually a photo i found of Allison Brie as a female Captain America that I used as reference to draw the first Scarlet design, mostly for the hair and maybe her disposition.

She took on the aesthetic of a sentai hero because I was first discovering a lot of the costume designs from the japanese productions of super sentai shows which fascinated me, even though I have no real connection to power rangers from childhood or anything like that. In fact, I still don't really enjoy or care much for these types of shows and I think that's a huge factor of why the comic has turned out the way it has, but I'll save that discussion for next week.

She had no name yet but I thought it would be fun for her to be sort of a bum at home that eats junk food and watches too much anime, making her a lot goofier than her appearance lets on. I had the silly idea to give her some sort of heroic pose to strike that wasn't much of anything, something that would make you laugh and go "what kind of pose is THAT??" The pose itself was pretty weird and maybe didn't come across funny enough but the idea still made it into the final comic when Scarlet strikes her pose in Chapter 7.

I'd say Scarlet didn't really have much purpose for me creatively until I read a manga by Miyata Kouji called Inugamihime ni Kuchizuke or the english, "Why not be my dog?" and it's the comic that inspired me the most to actually begin making a real attempt at trying comics as my career path. Kazura, the main character, completely reshaped how I wanted Scarlet to look and owes a lot to her design. (Looking through pages of this manga now so many years later is still giving me really strong feelings because of how important it is to me, haha!)

The comic itself is a weird concept, where a girl is the host body for her boss' dog spirit as they work for a shadow company that exorcises demons and she is constantly battling the sexual tension and possible harrassment that comes with the nature of the host process; a kiss on the lips as the initiation. It feels a liiiitle problematic if you want to view a detached reading of the concept but the characters are silly and fun and it's a very sexy story without taking itself very seriously. It really enabled me to explore putting all the weird self indulgent stuff into a story which also guided me to changing Scarlet's design. I really wanted a cutesy, quirky girl with long black hair and a really sexy body because I liked Kazura so much. I was still struggling to draw Scarlet with the body I wanted for her for a very very long time and only recently have I gotten her hips and waist shapes to a place that represents what I wanted her to look like.

As a small other thing, Scarlet was created to be a white girl named Scarlet Gainsborough in the pilot (I was trying to do some sort of wordplay relating her name to her gym rat personality), but as I've gotten older and my desire to see more of myself in the work that I make has developed, I've made a lot of my characters hispanic like me and Scarlet was one of them. I left it vague at the first chapters of the final comic so it was easy to make the shift, but Scarlet is now a light skinned Mexican girl named Scarlet Vega and I've been slowly shifting her hair to that of a thicker, almost wavy consistency. I think I'm still trying to hone in on the ideal look for her but she's very close now.

Along with the relationship dynamics of Miyata Kouji's manga, I was also watching a lot of Kim Possible at the time and that was giving me more shape to my story too. I really liked that competent female lead and bumbling male support of Kim and Ron and it was the basis for Scarlet and Edgar's dynamic. The influence rubbed off on Scarlet visually as well and it's where I got the idea to define only her top lip with lipstick.

The story in the beginning stages was about a girl working with the police as the wearer of a super suit to fight random monsters of the day like the super sentai shows and I made up Scarlet's sort of partner, the nerdy guy at the police station who does all the tech stuff and is responsible for her suit.

I didn't really have a visual direction for him until I decided I was going to base him on the musician Noah Lennox, known as Panda Bear.

His name came about from stories on Animal Collective message boards that there was a period of time where Noah Lennox was processing his grief of losing his dad to cancer and asked his bandmates to call him Edgar and they just let it slide because they knew he was working through it. It's such a dumb thing to use as the basis and no one will care about this but me, but I used it because of that story alone and my character has really developed into an "Edgar" and formed his own identity independent of my reference. He was originally working for the police, then I made him working on his own because I didn't find the idea of Scarlet always working with the cops very compatible to the romantic story I wanted to tell. There was one version of the story where Scarlet meets Edgar at the police station because he was arrested for one of his many inventions going haywire and causing another public disturbance, which is vaguely still sort of there in the final comic. I will try to build this out a bit better in upcoming chapters too.

He eventually morphed into someone that barely took care of himself because he was too hyperfixated on making his creations and that didn't really change too much. Scarlet's relationship to him wasn't really defined in the pilot, she just sort of knew him and was modeling his super suit for him and I was willing to let it just be how it was at the time, only thinking up a proper backstory for why they're together in the first place much later.

Ula was and remains to be my least developed character of the series and I'm going to be attempting to fix that soon, but her origin was just my first attempt at what was going to be a multitude of villains. I struggled to think up ideas for anything beyond Ula because I really didn't have that connection to super sentai shows and not much of an affinity for creatures or villains in general so I just tried to shape Ula to be the one antagonist. Her designs started as human with an aquatic theme that was a response to the villain designs I liked most from the sentai shows.

She morphed into a fish woman when I thought to make her more creature-like  and used these big old glossy eyes that I saw from Miyata Kouji's OTHER manga, "Oh My Sweet Alien!" I've written about this manga in the past, it was his last work before he died and I personally don't have a connection to it on the exact same level as the other manga but Oh My Sweet Alien is objectively a better told story and probably the better one to check out.

Ula was intended to be a Sea Witch at first, and she had a trident that you'll see her use in the pilot. I had a possible path to go down in the beginning where Mariel and I thought of having some other types of elemental witches but we went down the business owner route and I think it's maybe less derivative and tropey this way. After the pilot, I felt dissatisfied with Ula's look and did a couple more passes before I got to the final design, which was inspired by the fish girl in blue submarine no.6, mostly for the girl's skin pattern on her head and middle parting hair.

I also had proto guppies that were based on power rangers' putties at first, and then I tried to make them look more like their own unique style of cartoon henchmen but I didn't have the vocabulary to do anything really crazy with them so their designs were never really great. Their design in the pilot has the problematic full circle lips that was my attempt at doing something like, "oh they have fish lips" but regardless, I'm glad I steered away from them and wouldn't make the same decision knowing what I know now about the history of them. 

The guppies would later morph into something more akin to Toad in the Mario universe, and then even beyond the first few chapters I wanted to have more diverse fish so Mariel helped me explore a lot of fish designs when she drew chapter 5, and I tried to extend off of that in chapters 7 and 8. It was also a good thing the guppies weren't explained too much in the early chapters because it let me shift them to being less of a race of fish that Ula was hiring to do her bidding to more a specific job title at her company and they were just fish people, the same as everyone else at the company. It can just be a funny thing that the guppies are all the small fish, maybe for their discreetness or mobility being so small. I will have to think about that more in the future, haha.

The pilot itself is very messy in every way you can think of. The art was not too well drawn, the paneling, text, and word bubble style was rough, and the romantic element was pretty cheesy and unnatural feeling, but I think it set so much of the ground work for things that happen in the final comic too. Edgar still hypes up Scarlet in her suit and it's a part of their bond with each other. Scarlet still does a punch well beyond what was intended. She still loves anime and is a bit embarrassing with her willingness to act out dumb poses and say cheesy stuff related to it. The guppies are still just bumbling guys that just do whatever they're told because it's funny.

The differences like Scarlet getting to be known as a hero in the first page is something I actively wanted to avoid in the final comic. The suit having a transformation was fun for the pilot but it didn't serve any real purpose so I removed it. I sometimes wish Scarlet could try different colors on or have like an updated design but I think the suit is fine as it is and it calls too much attention to itself in a literal sense rather than what it means for Scarlet to get dressed up and put on a persona.

The Red Muscle has really grown into something a lot stronger than this initial idea and I'm really happy about it. I had basically no confidence in my writing ability at the time (hence why all my other comics from the time are hidden lol) and I think drawing a pilot (or oneshot or whatever you want to call it) of an idea you have but aren't confident about can be a great way to develop your skills. At some point you'll detach from your mindset of creating the work and you can read the final product you made and use your judgement on how the story makes you feel and you can learn a lot from it.

I'd like to do something else to celebrate the 5th anniversary too, maybe a hashtag for ppl to do fanart or something? It feels a bit presumptuous to ask for free art though so I don't really know! At the very least I'll have my illustration to share. Anyways, I hope you enjoy reading this early version of The Red Muscle. Please let me know what you think of this old comic and I'll see you next week!