Hidden Details: Ambush Royale (Patreon)

Wow, I did not expect to draw so many characters that are completely foreign to me this week. After all those Pokémon, Smash fighters and Masahiro Sakurai, it took some getting used to these burly first person shooter characters. But I do think we've covered both Apex Legends and Tetris 99 pretty nicely in a single comic, as well as touching base with the (very few) Fortnite fans that found us via one of the three Fortnite comics we've done.

Let me start this blog by revealing just who the hell these characters are:

The guy with the welding helmet is the poster boy of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (considered to be the first true/popular battle royale game). The muscular guy with the bandana is Frank Wood, a character from the Call of Duty series and a playable skin in Call of Duty's battle royale mode, Blackout. The girl with the pink hair is Lifeline, one of the heroes of Respawn's Apex Legends, a new battle royale game that launched two weeks ago. The guy with the green scarf is one of the default skins of Fortnite Battle Royale, also known and from here on referred to as Jonesy.

Frank Woods has got some cool tattoos on his arm but it was impossible to find a clear picture of them. And if I had found one, I still wouldn't feel very motivated to draw those intricate designs every panel, so I just messed around with his tattoos a bit in this comic. To the left, I drew a double Cool S because this dude is double cool. To the right, I just wrote "cool tattoos & shit". I can be very lazy and childish when it comes to designs like this dude's.

There are some interesting documents scattered on the table in the first panel. One is, as many af you will recognize, an invitation to join Smash! Who could it belong to?! The other sheets of paper are Wood's notes on the new enemy. He has classified the seven Tetris blocks into three different categories. The S-shaped Tetris blocks are a "moderate threat", the L shaped blocks, the block with the single protuding block in the middle and the 2x2 block are considered "medium threats" and the long, 1x4 block is considered "high threat". Now that I type this, I realize how little sense that categorization makes, but I get the feeling Frank Woods isn't the brightest light ever, so I'll let it slip.

In the second panel, you can see another version of Wood's tattoo: this time, I scribbled an Inkling. Because you know, tattoo's are ink.

In the third panel, some new characters are revealed: the Asain girl is Noriko Nakagawa, one of the main characters from the Japanese 2000 cult classic Battle Royale. She's not a game characters, but Battle Royale created the idea of an island filled with people who have to kill eachother, so I think she still deserved an appearance. In the movie, she gets shot in her right arm, that's why she's bleeding. Also, in Battle Royale, the students that have to kill each other on the island all get a random weapon, which is a pretty fun mechanic that I'd like to see implemented in a battle royale game one of these days. These weapons sometimes can't be considered weapons at all, just like Noriko's: she gets a pair of binoculars in the movie.

The other girl is Katniss Everdeen, the heroine from the Hunger Games books/movies (cough, Battle Royale ripoffs, cough) played by Jennifer Lawrence. Well... it's a Minecraft skin that makes the Minecraft character vaguely resemble Katniss Everdeen. The Minecraft Hunger games are Minecraft servers that basically allow Minecraft players to play a battle royale game in Minecraft. And it was around before PUBG or Fortnite, so I felt like a Minecraft-Katniss had to be in this comic somewhere.

I hope nobody notices it because I hate myself for including yet another sneaky Loss reference in Lifeline's bandana in the fifth panel.

In the sixth  panel, Wood's tattoo's include a hand making a circle (if you looked at it, I won) and an OwO. At this point, I was just referencing stupid memes.

Jonesy does three Fortnite dances/emotes throughout this comic. The first two are pretty obvious. He does the default dance in the first panel and the Floss in the fourth. But he also does one in the sixth panel! It's called Jubilation and to me, it kinda looks like the player is both celebrating and panicking at the same time, so I thought it was a fitting emote for this panel.

The red Tetris block with the mustache screams "для родины", which translates to "for the motherland". The green Tetris block in the bottom right corner is holding a little red flag with a symbol that kinda resembles the communist logo, but made with little square blocks.

This shouldn't have to be explained by the way, but the reason I've depicted the Tetris blocks as communist Russians is because Tetris was made by in the Soviet Union!

And I THINK that's all the hidden details I've managed to cram into this comic. We've made it in a single day, so we were very rushed, so I might have forgotten anything. If you spot something I've missed or something you don't understand, let me know!

And have a great weekend! I'll see you all next week!

Cheers,

Abel