Time to play a little bit of catch up.
With the wrap up of Pursuit Through the Pleiades, we’ve gotten a lot of world building with the cosmic side of the Menagerie-verse. While Bill already posted this on that thread, he gave me a bit of an early description of everyone’s favorite new character: The Most Illustrious Supernova of the Universe, the Legendary Navigator of the Space-ways, the Right Honorable Quinnar Gentry.
Wanted to make sure he wasn’t quite a re-costumed Concord, so did a bit of playing around with the eyes, in particular the extra ones on the right side of their face. Tried to evoke wings and feathers with the shapes, which I think fits their pirate aesthetic.
Speaking of Concordance characters, I figured we were going to see a lot of them in this story so I decided to do some looks for some generic Concordance agents and other empowered characters (your background characters).
The Acolytes would be those trained under the tutelage of Enora Dralis. And speaking of her, I did some refinement on her design. Leaning into “weird reptilian space nun” with this one.
And finally on the Megaverse front, Super Chica has really gone down a new path with her name change to La Cordera and I feel like that deserves a costume refresh.
Obligatory “it has pockets!.” Wanted to give her something that still says “I’m ready to fight” without it being the default state, hence the poncho. I also just think it would be cool for her to start off a fight by pulling it off, either the slow removal as she stares down her opponent or the quick whip off as things start too quickly to lean on ceremony. I think it would look very cool in a animated setting.
Moving on from the Megaverse, City of Clones just wrapped up and it really got me invested with the ANTIBODY Program as a villainous organization. And so I attempted to tackle the face of that organization: Jenny Byrne.
I think Bill said it best when I showed him this design and his response was "To vet any Jenny sketch, just show it to Dave and say ‘is this Jason’s type?’” so we’ll see what
@Dave has to say about it.
Next we move onto next month’s story, The Arcane Assassin. Don’t know much about the eponymous assassin yet, so we’ll instead focus on the Marvelous Menagerie’s other foe, the Seven Wonders. If there’s one member of the Wonders who gave me a headache, it’s the Hand. Not for any of the reasons you would imagine, but because there is already an unbelievable amount of stage magician characters in the Sentinels custom community and I didn’t want her design to overlap with theirs. (Seriously, I could have pulled up another four or five examples.)
I do like what I’ve come up with here but I think I’m going to want to take another refinement pass on her before calling it finished. Also going to need to tackle some of the other Wonders (3/7 so far) to make sure the group as a whole looks good together if not cohesive. They should not look like a well branded team, that’s for the Stellar Six.
And while I haven’t done that much designing with the Stellar Six, I did start with the most important part: a logo.
This team is so corporately branded (like the Serval Industries era of X-Factor) that having a logo in place was almost a requirement to build the rest of the team’s look around that central theme. Also got to be able to imagine it on an entire row of boxes in a toy store. These guys should feel like a live action Paw Patrol.
Finally, a step back to the Phase Two stories. Don’t remember if I showed this off to anyone other than Bill, but I really liked Doctor Zap from the Atlantis stories and took a crack at the old science squid.
Wanted to channeled a bit of Don Bluth energy here. Got to give Zap a bit of appeal without going full anthropomorphic and I think the pseudo-eyebrows work with that.
Thoughts?
But to give what I always ask from other people, here’s some specifics.
