PART ONE
PART TWO
PART TWO PART 2
PART THREE
PART FOUR
Yikes, I lost track of time again!! I put alerts in my phone yesterday so it’ll remind me to do new posts every other day from now on. I really got sucked into trying to finish this TMNT thing (which I’ll post some stuff from under the paid tier when it’s done!), I’m so terrible at multi-tasking when I have multiple projects at once. ARGH
Anyway, after the events of Part Four and my original Shadoweyes partner leaving the project, I went solo on the comic. Once I got past all that shit and got past the heartache and everything, I was super inspired and went full steam ahead on the comic, I even did a 50-page self-published Shadoweyes ashcan before the full comic was finished, I was just so excited to get some of it out there for people to see. I can’t remember which convention I had copies of the ashcan for, maybe San Diego? It was also nice for me to release the ashcan mentally/emotionally-speaking, like it was me saying “I don’t need you” to the ex-collaborator. Kind of cathartic.
I don’t tend to do a lot of worldbuilding before a project is actually in progress, for better or worse, so a lot of the development of the setting the comic takes place in was done on the fly in the early days, with a lot of blanks left up to the reader’s (and my own) imagination. For example, the city the characters live in, Dranac, in the final comic ended up being in the middle of a wasteland desert, with a water shortage and dry, hot climate. But in the ashcan, I had it raining in one scene, just because rain is moody and rain in a dystopian city reminded me of The Crow, haha. So in the subsequent full comic I removed the rain and puddles; there was a lot of development like that along the way in the earlier days.
I don’t know why I operate like that, it would definitely be better to lay out setting details like that early on rather than continually tinkering with it along the way, which inevitably produces continuity errors or snap decisions I change my mind about later. I’m not sure I could make myself work that way though, as you guys have probably gathered over the past few months I’m very by-the-seat-of-my-pants, haha. My process is like “Yeah it should be RAINING in this scene like The Crow. The Crow is awesome” then “Oh wait but a WASTELAND DESERT CITY would be even better! Yeah let’s do THAT!”
Another thing I ended up changing is the river that originally went through the city, as seen here in this sketch. The river ended up being changed to a reservoir in later versions, to match up with the desert city/water shortage thing.
Dranac taking shape! It still sort of has a real world city look to it here, I hadn’t quite figured it out yet. I believe both these two sketches were done while still working with the collaborator, so these drawings were more in line with what she was doing and I was trying to capture that.
Here we go, now we’re talkin’! I eventually made Dranac a cluttered mess of buildings stacked on top of each other, taking inspiration from Midgar from Final Fantasy 7, the real-life Kowloon Walled City, and some Blade Runner. I started thinking about a city that had different levels as the builders continually built on top of previous structures, unable to expand outward because of the wasteland and a perimeter wall around the city. The city would end up having levels that don’t see sunlight at all, and have all sorts of dark corridors and labyrinth-like areas the deeper you go.
Here’s a cutaway showing the different levels idea, with the lower ones butting up against the bedrock and other rock formations (something I haven’t shown in the actual comic, I should do that…). I really need to do a full map of the entire city…
Below is a very unfinished sketch of an overhead view of the city. It’s divided up into four districts, and at this point I was working off a draft where there was a separate suburb-type area called Boilertown that Scout would eventually flee to while she’s on the run from the law. I ended up removing that entirely fairly recently. At the south end of the city is Old Dranac, an abandoned area of ruins, which featured in an earlier draft where Scout did battle with a bird-themed street gang called the Birds (lol).
Anyways, so after the short ashcan I put out myself, I pitched Shadoweyes around to a few publishers but nobody was interested, and it eventually landed at SLG. They’re a well-known but smallish publisher, and I got paid about $500 for the whole thing, hahaaa. I was so eager to do the book and so rarin’ to go, though, that I agreed and I hit the ground running. I think I’ve mentioned already that I did the entire 300+ page comic in one year, in 2010, I was on fire. It was split into two books, Shadoweyes and Shadoweyes In Love, but I did them both mostly in one go so it’s always seemed like one book to me.
2010 was the worst year I’ve ever had financially, I made about $2000 total that entire year, it was a disaster, it seemed like nobody was hiring and at the end of that year I was preparing for the possibility of having to find a regular job (I was eyeing the bakery down the street). For years it felt like Shadoweyes was CURSED, like nothing good ever comes from it, just obstacle after obstacle, mess after mess.
Around that time, the Shadoweyes story also had other characters that ended up getting axed for various reasons. The two major ones were Ratana aka Sewer Rat and Purge.
Sewer Rat was basically like Catwoman except a rat (maybe she should’ve been Ratwoman). She and Scout didn’t have anything romantic going on, their dynamic was like Sewer Rat didn’t want anything to do with Scout, she just wanted to be left alone to cause trouble, while Scout would constantly hound her to make better life choices. I ended up removing her because she felt like she didn’t fit with the Scout/Kyisha/Noah/Sparkle love square (like a love triangle but a square) I wanted to focus on. I still really like the character and her look, maybe I’ll still do something with her at some point.
Next up is Purge! He was going to be the main villain in the third book. He was a supercop determined to clean up Dranac, like a celebrity hero that everyone loves, but Scout discovers that Purge’s secret superpower is a mind-altering vomit that he pukes into the city reservoir. The Purge-puke would pacify people and make them more docile, thus eliminating crime but at the cost of drugging everyone, blah blah blah, kind of a tired, trite idea, I know, that’s partly why I axed the whole thing. The rest of the story was Scout teaming up with the Birds to take down Purge. I still like the visual of a revered superhero being discovered barfing into the water supply, though, haha.
NEXT TIME I’ll talk about Sparkle and the mummy girl!
Also Is there anything in particular about Shadoweyes development you guys would like to hear about?
As always, so cool to learn about the background. What do I want to hear about someday? I want to know about character missions and passions. I mean, you said Purge wanted to clean up the city, but then you said he's evil. Seems like a conflict to me. Why's he like that? What's his background. Barfing? Gross-o-moto. Maybe he has a mutant gland that secretes a mind-altering chemical. But why? I want to know WHY :-))
More good stuff!