FAILED-PROJECT FRIDAY: CANNIBAL SUN, pt.1 (Patreon)

Last week, the defunct Kill Bill pitch. This week, enjoy some 2003 artwork from Cannibal Sun, an SF comic I once intended to do for Wildstorm's now-defunct Cliffhanger line.  (The image above is from a "Happy Holidays"  jpeg I sent around to friends and acquaintances, featuring colors by the great Ryan Kinnaird.)

Cannibal Sun was, in effect, a much harder-edged,  further-into-the-future take on some of the SF tropes that I was exploring later on in my version of the Dirty Pair. The idea of anything  resembling a normal human being (as Kei and Yuri do, despite all their  augmentation and technology) conceivably surviving for more than a few milliseconds in combat with blindingly fast machines and nanoviruses and  tachycognitive AIs and the like seems kinda ridiculous, if you think  about it. So "Skaya," the lead character from Cannibal Sun, was (at  times) far from a normal human being, needless to say.

As you might have guessed, Skaya's jacket was based on that leather jacket, for which I've posted the photoreference in a few earlier Patreon posts. (And Skaya's name is short for Vashnevskaya, for long-time readers who can catch an arguably obscure reference.)  

Anyhoo, the project was, in fact, accepted at Wildstorm; I still have a copy of the remarkably lucrative Cliffhanger contract, stained with my  tears. (Cliffhanger, you'll remember, was the old Wildstorm imprint that  featured big-time books from heavy hitterss such as Joe Madureira, J. Scott Campbell, Humberto Ramos and Chris Bachalo.) Cannibal Sun came to naught, though, after numerous revisions, nagging artistic problems, and, well, the collapse of the entire Cliffhanger line. 

The big issue, artistically, was that the series was just too damn ambitious for me to draw. I just couldn't face the task of doing the ridiculously  complicated and bizarre far-future settings the book required, for one thing. For another, I couldn't deal with how much detail I'd have to ram into the pencils, as the book was slated to be shot from "digital inks" of my pencils, as seen in the samples above. 

"Digital inks" based on penciled work really are an art form all their own, as I found when three different colorists converted my pencils to "pseudo-inks" on the last three issues of the miniseries Dirty Pair: Run from the Future. By far the best at the conversion process was the colorist Margaret Hessian, who did all the digital inks in the tests above.  Below, you can see tests of different pencil types, as I struggled to find the best tool for the new process:

Skaya's hairstyle is based on one that my friend Elin Winkler sported back when she posed for Roxy/ Freefall photoreference in Gen13: Grunge! the Movie. This was a separate photoshoot from the "fancy leather jacket" one I've posted here; in fact, down the road, I'll scan some of those Elin pics and show them along with the comic art they inspired. A new Patreon feature, folks! (Now I just gotta find the time to scan and annotate all that stuff.) 

Above, more color samples from Ryan Kinnaird. Sadly, Elin's hair did not, in fact, glow in a neon-y fashion as Skaya's does here, though that would've looked cool.  

Side note: The title Cannibal Sun was taken from yet another defunct project, as it was originally was the title of a space-combat-heavy Dirty Pair miniseries that I wanted to do with Joe Wight, who worked on the Star Wars manga covers with me. And that DP project in turn was salvaged from a defunct Star Wars pitch, involving what was basically a Firefox scenario (as in the Clint Eastwood movie) with a Rebel infiltrator hijacking a TIE Interceptor and trying to evade and outwit an entire Imperial fleet... Oh, well. 

Interestingly, I still have enough unseen work in an ancient, migrated-from-a-dozen-hard drives "SKAYA" folder to yield another post on Cannibal Sun here at some point. (Maybe next Friday...?) Perhaps I can get into the various reasons why I've never seriously attempted to repitch the project, as it possessed some further inherent flaws that rendered it nonviable in my eyes. 

Gotta pull the plug on this post, though, as I just sank a g-d hour of my all-important morning shift into setting it up. Time to get back to the drawing table and crank away at roughs for a new one-shot SF comic, roughs which are proving extraordinarily challenging. (Ughh.)