I was cleaning up my external hard drive today and I found all the super old Shadoweyes concept art, so I thought I’d post some of that and talk a bit about the development of the series and all that kind of stuff, warts and all!
The basic design of Scout/Shadoweyes has its origins in a character called Faze that I made up in middle school for a superhero comic called What the H.E.C.K. (I cannot remember what the H.E.C.K. acronym stood for, haha). Faze was like a combination of a Ninja Turtle, HR Giger’s Alien design, Horridus from Erik Larsen’s Freak Force comic, and a swimsuit-clad gritty 90s Image Comics superhero babe, except with (naturally) four arms so she could dismember multiple people at once. I wish I had some artwork of her but sadly I have no idea where all that stuff went, I wonder if my mom has it saved somewhere, haha.
Around that same time in the early-mid 90s we were playing a lot of Heroes Unlimited (a tabletop superhero RPG by Palladium) and Faze made her way into that and eventually had a daughter with a friend’s character (as often happens). The daughter was named Razerback and she became my absolute favorite character for years, and she was the seed that would eventually lead to Shadoweyes. Razerback didn’t have anything to do with actual razorbacks or pigs of any kind, 12-year-old me just thought the name was awesome and also made it even more awesome by changing the O to an E.
Our characters back then didn’t really have backstories other than they had superpowers and ran around doing anti-hero things and fighting each other. Faze and Razerback never had a particular origin other than they were just X-Men-style mutants born with innate powers and that was that.
Razerback went through many changes including getting killed by a guy with a motorcycle-mounted machine gun (I was SO UPSET) and then coming back as a cyborg and turning evil for a while.
Here’s the oldest picture of Razerback I could find, probably from around 1997-1998. Please note the old school Photoshop 3.0 motion blur and airbrush effects done with a mouse.
This pic was done after I’d gotten rid of her second set of arms (I was really into four-armed characters for a while), and I’m not sure if there was a colored version somewhere or maybe it was always black & white; when I’d color her she was usually a shade of teal. Her powers were the usual generic superhero stuff, like increased strength and agility, healing factor, she could cling to walls and slash people with her claws, etc. She could also turn her hands into weapons like the T-1000 but I can’t remember if that was an innate thing or something like nanomachines injected into her.
After that original Heroes Unlimited game ended and our gaming group had fallen apart, I’d go on to put Razerback into other games over the years, updating her each time. Here she is in 2005:
Back then I didn’t have a Wacom tablet yet, I’m actually kind of impressed with how well I did colors and shading just using a mouse. I believe the linework in this drawing here was done with a micron pen. Originally she had a black marking over one eye (like a 90s Image character) and her other eye was fully black, I have no idea why other than it looked cool. For whatever reason I dropped that for this 2005 version (definitely a mistake).
Anyway, the picture above was for another superhero campaign we were doing in which Razerback’s real name was Max Montana, and she had a human family. The storyline was long-running and very convoluted but long story sort of short at one point my friend’s character Morgan had a mutant baby with Razerback (who had a huge mutant penis hidden inside her that would pop out during sex, obviously, and whoops Morgan got pregnant), and they had to hide the baby from an evil government-sponsored super-team. Luckily there was a parallel dimension where mutants/superpowered people didn’t exist, so through a series of events Morgan and Razerback hid the baby in that other world with Razerback’s parallel self, who was a regular human.
The baby’s name was Scout, and Max would raise her in the alternate dimension, the only mutant/metahuman in that other world. Morgan and Razerback would later revisit the parallel dimension to OF COURSE find that time passed more quickly there, and Scout was a teenager with a vigilante alter-ego called Shadowknife.
WHAT A MESS.
TO BE CONTINUED IN PART TWO!
That was a lot of fun to read, thank you very much for sharing your story with us. :) I'm looking forward to PART TWO.
Holy crap this brings me back! I remember you telling me some of this stuff when we were at SCAD! I definitely remember seeing those two pictures! So cool to see this stuff again.