PART ONE
PART TWO
PART TWO PART 2
And we’re back! My friend Zach unearthed some other old art for our Heroes Unlimited game. Here are some unfinished/WIP Razerbacks:
And below is a weird version I don’t remember, I’m not sure what the deal is here with her arm blade things. Looks like I was trying to do something like what Gamera’s enemy Iris has in Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris, she has long lance-like bone weapons on her arms that can slide forward for a stabbing attack. In any case, seems like Razer can never get away from having a big revealing cutout in the front of all her outfits, ha.
Anyway! So where I last left off with Shadoweyes, I’d started hashing out the actual comic with my collaborator at the time. She did a lot of the initial design work and I’d play off what she was doing and add my own ideas, batting things back and forth.
I took the basic setup from the Heroes Unlimited game and used that as a starting point, including using Razerback’s parallel universe human self Max Montana as Scout’s mom, which is where that character and the Montana surname come from originally.
At first, Scout had other superpowers that we kept fiddling with and which I ultimately discarded, like she could transform into a living shadow form, manipulate shadows/darkness in various ways, teleport through shadows, and being able to see through every other shadow near her, like a surveillance array x-ray vision, if that makes any sense. It was like Scout could peer into one shadow, and use other shadows nearby as other vantage points/points of view, I’m not even sure how to explain it but surprisingly this power actually stuck around long enough to make it into the first draft or two of the original script. I guess it was a neat if confusing idea but I’m glad I scrapped it because it didn’t make any sense and I have no idea how I would’ve drawn a visual of it.
The more my collaborator and I drew Scout and fiddled with her design, the further she strayed from the original Razerback template.
Below I think is where I first got rid of the bright stripe on her face and underbelly, it felt too fussy. I also started simplifying her black markings here and refining her “S” emblem. Her emblem has stayed pretty much the same since the below drawing.
She was way more lithe in the beginning, as opposed to the squat kind of design she ended up with. In the below two drawings, you can see I started making her feet/lower legs bigger, which would eventually continue to ridiculous proportions.
Some other concept sketches:
Here’s where I started simplifying her tail spikes:
This below pic is I believe the first time I drew her goggles, which were like Riddick’s goggles in Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick, to protect Scout’s photosensitive eyes during the day. Her tail has four spikes here unlike the previous one’s two, I think I was just trying anything and everything at that point, continuity be damned.
Besides Scout, the other two main characters were her best friend Kyisha Lynn and her love interest Noah Mendoza (harkening back to those two Casey Jones-style vigilante characters in our Heroes game that I mentioned in Part Two). Noah was originally going to have his own vigilante alter-ego called Wrathcatcher. I don’t recall where that name came from, it’s kind of both cool and stupid at the same time.
After my collaborator left the project, I ditched the Wrathcatcher name and the gas mask look, and in the comic Noah doesn’t wear a mask or have a codename, which I felt was a better contrast to Scout/Shadoweyes, and it made him more reminiscent of Casey Jones (who I love!).
Other than that, Noah’s basic design has stayed mostly unchanged from what my collaborator came up with, although I had him cut his hair eventually.
And here’s Kyisha! Back then she was QUITE different than what she’d end up like, I suppose most notably going from her huge boobs as seen here to being completely flat-chested. Her face also changed a lot, and her fashion sense became more classy and sleek.
I’m getting an alert that this post is too long for email format so I guess I’ll wrap it up. Next time I’ll talk a bit about the HUGE FALLING OUT I had with my collaborator and how that changed the direction of the comic, and I’ll talk about some characters who were axed and didn’t end up in the comic at all!
And as always, don’t forget tooooooooo
TO BE CONTINUEDDD
Shadowhistory
I love the backstory, thank you for sharing with us, Sophie! And many thanks to Zach!
Thank you very much for sharing this with us! :)