Midnight Reign design blog - part 1 (Patreon)

Hello, everyone. Justin here. 

In this series, I'll be detailing what my process is when it comes to the designs of characters in the world of Salvadora. The first one I'm going to tackle is the "newest" addition to the cast, Midnight Reign. If you've been paying attention to the comic for a while, you'll notice that Midnight Reign (MR) isn't exactly new, but a redesign of one of the older villain characters in the comic, Sunshine Savior. A pretty drastic redesign, all things considered, but why is that?

Salvadora's intial conception was a fairly haphazard event and a lot of the designs intially followed two rules: they were very trope heavy and there was a lot of skimp. About two-and-a-half years ago, when a lot of the comic's general rough patches were getting ironed out, one of the things I wanted to do was to make a change to how things progressed from story to story. A byproduct of that was that I wanted there to be some form of a serious threat in the comic. This would either involve the creation of an entirely new character or evolving a character that we already had.

Personal admission, I was never a huge fan of Sunshine Savior's design. It felt like something that was trying really hard to appeal to a particular audience that I wasn't sure even existed and it never stuck with me (A suspicion I found to be correct considering several☺ readers barely remember her). She also had an ambiguous enough of a power set to where trying to add depth to her character would make her fairly simple to build on top of. If I'm being entirely candid, a lot of the decision was made to simply get rid of the old costume. However, how do you go about making a new design for a pre-established character? Well, that's what two years of on and off scrambling leads to.

Two years of establishing motivations, building backstories, and constantly tinkering those things into a would-be design. A design that really only had one rule: She has to look cool.