The Spring semester ended last week. It was my biggest workload, with 4 studio art classes to deal with, but it was also my strongest since coming to ETSU, with the A's finally outnumbering the B's, 3 to 2. SUCCESS.
Summer is in gear and I am starting to grind away with the Creative Process. My time at work is spent reading through comics voraciously and drawing. I swear I think I've learned more about drawing the human anatomy from a few issues of Heavy Metal than I ever did when I took figure drawing. Or maybe I'm just paying more attention. I don't know. Regardless, my figures are getting a little better. I just need to eventually move on from sketches to doing actual pieces. I want to do more than a couple paintings...
I also want to do another comic. Like, BEFORE I take the comic book class in June.
Of course, I'm dry when it comes to ideas currently. When I first did the Ezra Neuro comic, I had envisioned doing two or three more stories with the Radioglyphs. Now, though, I'm hesitant. Ezra is boring to draw, the other characters are laughable and unnecessary, and plus that comic was an experiment. Conceived, drawn, and finished in a week as just a massive creative burst, an exploding bomb with little or no forthought involved at all. I didn't want to get bogged down explaining who these characters were, where they were, what it was they did, or anything. And to do more stories would mean having to actually expand things from the cartoony madness. It would require actually fleshing out these characters that were meant to be nothing more than people that jumped around and fought a giant monster. If I just did another stand-alone thing like the first one, I feel like it'd diminish the inherent charm. No matter what I may try to do with Ezra, I still have to actually THINK and PLAN, and that goes against the philosophy I had with that comic, with that character.
But I found a muse:
Say hello to Aimee Mullins (which is coincidently the name of a girl I have classes with). She is an athlete, actress, and fashion model. With prosthetic legs. I know next to nothing about her outside of what I just told you, but I find her absolutely awesome, and quite attractive too.
So it hit me: you don't see very many main characters in comics (or most other media, I suppose) that are amputees or anything of that sort. I mean, Daredevil, my favorite superhero, is about the only one because he's blind. And sure, there are characters like Cyborg from the Teen Titans and Forge from X-Men, who have robotic prostheses with weapons and other high-tech crap, but that's not quite the same.
Thus, I have decided to design a female character with dual prosthetic legs, much like Aimee up above, who would star in her own comic. This is a somewhat delicate situation, of course. Calling attention to her lack of flesh-and-bone legs too much would be bad. You don't want to get all preachy and trite. I just want a kickass chick who happens to have prosthetic legs. But I can get totally creative, too: I want her to have a mad scientist-type partner, a guy who builds and invents stuff all the time, who is constantly building new legs for her. Like, crazy, weird designs that are borderline impractical, to the point where it makes her nervous when she's about to strap on a pair of jet boosters that are supposed to make her fly like Iron Man.
Of course, the idea still works. Sure, he's a mad inventor, but what would she do? I was thinking she'd be a space pilot, but no. Not quite. My girlfriend suggested that she repairs robots at the same time I considered making her a satellite repair technician. I'm still undecided. Unlike Ezra Neuro, I want to flesh her out. Also, she needs a name. Hurm.
Also of influence is Olivia Dunham, played by Anna Torv in Fringe, which is my current favorite TV show. My girlfriend got the first season on DVD for me, and I watch an episode or two almost every night. I love her to death because she's a very badass FBI agent, going out of her way to get things done. One of my favorite moments is in the pilot episode, where she's chasing a guy across rooftops. He jumps off a roof, hits the wall of the adjacent building and lands on the fire escape and runs down the steps. Without thought, she makes the same leap, hits the wall, lands, then leaps off the fire escape and onto a dumpster. She also is not afraid to draw her gun and start firing, if she needs to. Absolutely awesome.
So there we have it. The beginnings of a comic are coming together.
And yes, I still plan on drawing and painting a sloth or two. Yes yes yes.
Anyways, it's time to start creating. I need to find a proper soundtrack to work to...
[Brett]