I’m currently in the process of devolping out a comic based on some abstract characters I designed years ago for Meteor’s My Famicase gallery all the way back in… 2016 I think? It’s certainly been a while, that’s for sure. This was the year my submission featured a fictional game I called Bad Girls Club: Part Two, a game I always imagined as one of those obscure Famicom point and click adventure games. I think largely I was inspired by the Famicom Detective Club games (note to self, I still gotta pick up those new localizations) as well as some of my favorite comedy anime good-cop-bad-cop-actually-wait-they’re-both-bad-cop duos like Panty & Stocking.
I envisioned it being a mystery solving adventure game with two characters who honestly kinda couldn’t be bothered to actually care about the mystery they’re solving, but still end up saving the day anyway. The two main characters, Ray and Linz were always some of my favorite designs I’ve ever come up with, and over the years, I found myself doodling in sketchbooks ideas for comics, visual novels, and even at some point a light novel. Well, recently I’ve been very interested in making another comic since it’s been a few years and while driving home from work, I came up with an entire rough concept for a story starring the Bad Girls Club.
Eventually, I wrote out the whole thing and had a rough story that I’m still generally breaking down some finer points on, but in general I’m happy with what I’ve come up with and really want to make it a reality. I figured my blog would be a great place to kinda document my process of making this comic a reality as both a document and a way to invite my friends and fans into some of the stuff I’m working through with it. So let’s dive into some recent stuff I’ve been trying to hash out— updated character designs!
Ray and Linz originate from a few years ago and in the years since, my skill, style, and technique have all changed quite a bit. This was still at a point in breaking my style where I could figure out if I liked drawing characters with round dots for eyes or the thinner slits I think my art has kinda come to be known for by this point. Heck even just looking back at some of the first drawings from 2016, I had a strong idea of the silohuettes I wanted these characters to possess, but the proportions aren’t quite there yet.
I did try to recreate the original drawing/poses in a recent limited t-shirt design (that only like a dozen people bought, if you are one of them, congrats you earned yourself a high five if I ever meet you) that started getting where I wanted it to be; better proportions, emphasis on Ray’s bulbous roundness and Linz’s leaner sharper edges, and replacing Ray’s cigarette with a lollipop, a characteristic I’m still not sure if I’m sold on yet.
After a few more sketches with the intention to develop these characters out into a comic, I did land on the 2022 sketch seen here. There’s an attempt to draw them with a bit more volume and dimension on top of figuring out what details can be streamlined to make for a stronger design. We’re almost there!
I also ran through a few exercise to try drawing both characters over and over and over again— after all, this helps to break the characters and helps me to feel out what’s the most effective way to actually construct them since you may be drawing a single character hundreds of times across multiple frames. So for one of my first exercises, I returned to my old friend, the expression chart!
In the process, I managed to streamline both characters to places I’m really happy with! Ray still retains her apple-y shape, but I’ve moved her features to the center of her face and created a special up-angled pose to prevent her bangs from eating up details. Linz’s hair shape also kept the unified shape I stumbled onto in recent drawings where altogether the hairdo creates a sort of crescent shaped curtain to retain her reserved aloofness.
Honestly, figuring out Ray’s expressions felt pretty natural since I designed the character to have these BIG emotions. She picks fights, the acts before thinking, and can be the loudmouth of the duo. But Linz? She’s supposed to be much more quiet and domineering. She can enter a room and her glare should say so much more than her words could. But how to make sense of this if the character’s face is mostly covered up and larger mouth shapes just feel weird on the character? The answer, I think, lied somewhere between careful placement of the pursed lips and letting the lone eyebrow do a lot of the heavy lifting. Sounds easy, but expressing 25 different emotions with these tools is harder than it sounds on paper.
There’s still some more exploration to be done with these characters as I hammer out poses and costuming for them. All this on top of the fact that I actually did extend the duo into a trio to help move the story along— it’s always good having more characters to talk to and allows for a more enthusiastic participant where Ray & Linz may be much more reluctant to act outside their own self interests. But more on that at another time, I suppose. Perhaps when it comes time to talk story, but those are cards I definitely plan on holding a little bit closer to the chest…