Crew doodles

I'm working on the looks and traits of the crew on the space freighter - both in writing and in doodles, and I just thought I want to share some of the doodles... I haven't decided on any specific looks on the cast, though I like the short haired, bright looking female character though. She would fit in quite neat with the somewhat daft captain. Her name is McKenzie (just McKenzie) and she'll be the ships navigator. I think I got the captain somewhat worked out (he's the guy below, having a quiet drink). He's named Rob Roos, and he is not a people person. He doesn't like space either, but since you don't run into a lot of people out there, it's where he prefers to be. His motto would be "L'enfer, c'est les autres" if he could speak other languages than Terran Standard... Untill he learns, it's "Get the f*** lost, you mindless tosser!"

I always find it hard to settle for a final set of characters, so this time I've decided just to go with whoever I feel will work, and if it turns out they don't, then just get rid of them. Very holistic...

Freighter - Hauler Class

I'm currently working on the design of the cargo freighter, belonging to my main protagonists - but I still haven't worked it out yet. This one is somewhat in the right direction, but it does looks like something you've seen before. And I think it's a bit too big. I still like it, and that's why I decided to post it here. 

The ship I need got to have a little more personality, but nothing like the Millenium Falcon (where do Han put the cargo on that ship???) and a bit more together than Serenity (it does look like they mashed 5 ships together into one)...

And thanks to Google SketchUp...

Kate Beaton

Sometimes you just strike gold without actually making the effort of looking for it.

I was ambling along on-line, minding my own business, when suddenly this amazing webcomic popped into existence on my ViewSonic - completely out of the blue! (And here's a big thanks to Neatorama for posting an illustration done by her to lead me on!) The very talented Kate Beaton, who is awesomer than awesome, is the woman behind this hilarious and well drawn comic. Go look if you don't believe me, but don't come a-blaming me, when you suddenly realize that you've spend most of your working hours reading witty comics, broadening your views and challenging your intellect with sharp satire.

Just selecting which strips and drawings to represent her work here on Astrocities has been quite a challenge, since there's so many goodies, but I think I got a fair bunch selected. Judge for yourself...


Well... they are!

This one I picked, because I once wrote an essay about the norman invasion of England - Sorry for being self centered...

Anyway, Kate Beaton origins from Nova Scotia, has a history degree and lives in Ontario and fancies to draw pictures. Her website is http://www.harkavagrant.com/.

Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld - Scottish cartoonist and illustrator - is the man behind books such as "Guardians of the Kingdom", "3 Very Small Comics (Volumes One to Three)", "Robots, Monsters etc", "Hunter and Painter" and "The Gigantic Robot". He's also the guy behind the cartoon "Move to the City", which ran in London Time Out 2001-2002 and is currently producing a cartoon for The Guardian. I just love his subtle and underplayed style.

In connection with the book "The Gigantic Robot" Lego Robots were made (by himself I presume) as publicity for his agent Heart. Probably the most robotic automatons ever build in Lego! Cool eh?

Valérian & Laureline

The SciFi comic book series Valérian, the SpatioTemporal Agent, created by writer Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières, was launched as early as 1967 in the french magazine Pilote.

"World Without Stars" (1971) was the first Valérian album I ever read.
It starred the-not-the-brightest-but-very-likable-lad Valérian and his fellow protagonist the-independent-and-intelligent Laureline, and I fell instantly in love with the series. It was amazing. I had the feeling of actually visiting another, almost real place, or maybe even more exact: to witness a study in Extraterrestrial Anthropology. A slice of Life on the planet Zahir, where a serious battle of the sexes took place (A full resume can be read here, though I strongly suggest you buy the album).

The main characters were both agents in time and space in the 28th century, boldly going where only few men (and women) had gone before them. But this wasn't just Star Trek version Française - This was the more gritty kind. The kind without people with huge, balled heads in tin foil suits, shiny plastic bubbles all over the place and a horizon 13 meters away. It was mud and oil. Huge planets and rocky landscapes. And two people far away from home.

But what really makes Valérian and Laureline stand out, is the profound humanism, that seems to be leaking out between the pages. The story would typically take it's beginning in some ideological differences between various alien groups, and the differences would be resolved through reason and perseverance. Not by firing nukes or photon torpedoes.

People has been known to accuse Christin and Mézières of being too much inspired by George Lucas and vice versa. It's hard to tell who's inspired by who, though I'm not aware of George Lucas ever having been introduced to Valérian, whereas Star Wars on the other hand is quite hard to miss. It is said though, that Doug Chiang, design director on The Phantom Menace, kept a set of Valérian albums in his library.

Mézières' response upon seeing Star Wars was that he was "dazzled, jealous... and furious!". As a riposte, he produced an illustration for Pilote magazine in 1983 depicting the Star Wars characters Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa meeting Valérian and Laureline in a bar surrounded by a bestiary of alien creatures typical of that seen in both series. "Fancy meeting you here!" says Leia. "Oh, we've been hanging around here for a long time!" retorts Laureline.

The Millennium Falcon may to some degree look like their ship - the XB 982, but it's purely coincidental. There are some recurring details in the designs, but none I'd say were evidence of design theft. And that goes for the alien designs too. They may just be a visual expressions of the period the designers themselves were living in.

Valérian ran for 43 years(!) years until it's conclusion in 2010, which in my opinion were quite some time too late. Since "On the Frontiers" (1988) reading Valérian had been like watching an old relative slipping into dementia. You'd think of all the good times you used to have together and not really looking forward to whatever would come next. In the first album of the series "The City of Shifting Waters" (1968) the Earth infrastructure had collapsed due to nuclear detonations in the year 1986 - an occurrence that in the 28th century had lead to the establishing of the future society and Galaxity (the home of The Time and Space Agency)- but as time caught up and the eighties came around, Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières agreed to let Valérian and Laureline travel back in time to stop the nuclear disaster, and thereby destroying Galaxity! Suddenly the two main characters were left without any purpose in deep space, and since then the quality of both the story line as well as the art has gone drastically down.

The lesson here should be, that if you ever want to destroy the world as we know it (narratively speaking), stage it to happen after you're dead, so you won't end up in the same, embarrassed situation.

Theirs been a few thing on my mind lately...

 

(Read more Chuck and Beans comics here.)

Vaughn Bodé

I was truely awestruck, the fist time I read a Vaughn Bodé "Erotica" album. It was in the early 80'es and up till then all I knew about comics had basically included Spirou, Tintin, Asterix and the miscellaneous Marvel and DC comics that seemed to be everywhere.
The Bodé style was so extravagant and powerful! I'd never seen anything like it and after finishing it, I had to pick it up and reread it over and over again. The linework were so fat and juicy and the colours so bright it hurt your eyeballs, if you stared too hard at them, and I was thrilled. Some of the stories weren't really that good, but whatever the stories lacked, the artwork made up for it by far. Every picture in his comics seems to be an vignette by it self, composed to stand alone, but accidentally brought together to form these wierd stories.

And what characters they had! Most of them were sexually frustrated lizards and the few who weren't lizards, were mostly "broads" (labeling those as "characters" in this context is somewhat of a overstatement, sorry). They made a mockery of everything, and that without a trace of politically correctness, finger pointing or taboos in any of them. It was truly great and very tantalising for a young boy.

Some years after my first encounter with Bodé, I discovered his comic "Deadbone" which again was brilliant. As Comicrag.com describes it:

"The world of Deadbone is explored with a constantly shifting parade of weird lizards, sexy broads, soldiers, fascists and sages all in funny, strange, sexy or even enlightening situations."
Which In my humble opinion is quite precise.

But compared with the Erotica series, Deadbone contained a more structured, limited universe - the mountain "Deadbone" and the small town on it's peak (very phallic and very Bodé), and for a period of time I worked really hard on converting the Deadbone world into a RPG. I gave up though when I couldn't find the right angle on it, but I still think someone should give it a shot.

His biggest sucess was "Cheech Wizard," a wizard wearing a large yellow hat, covered with black and red stars that covers his entire body except his red legs. Bodé tried to adress a broader public with it in 1967. It obviously didn't go well with the times and it sank back into the underground from where it came, and got a huge following there. I still prefer the black and white 60'es version - the 70'es are just too dopey and repetitive for me.

Vaughn Bodé died in 1975, age 33, of autoerotic asphyxiation, or perhaps the use of asphyxia as a meditation aid. A terrible loss for the comic industry, and only very few comic artists has since made such an impact on pop culture as he did - Especially the graffiti movement owes him a lot, borrowing, copying and generally being inspired by his artwork and style. Graffiti pieces literally wouldn't be the same without him, even though he - to my knowledge - never made a single graffiti himself.


Just recently I found out that he in the 60'es illustrated a series of classics for "reading challenged" children and these are really quite nice. All very sharp and well composed, and in them you can see both his knack for vignettes as well as his big influences by Burne Hogarth and Milton Caniff. The one shown here is taken from Jules Verne's "20.000 Leagues Under the Sea".

Do check some of them out here: They are very nice.

A sample of a typical "Erotica" comic can be seen here.

Tomb by mrcolossal

Tomb: A very alive and kicking web comic, that just shouldn't be missed. This is good stuff for any comic craving soul. The anarchy just seem to ooze out of the page. Go see. Now!

See more of mrcolossal other comics and and brilliant sketches at his blog:

http://mrcolossal.livejournal.com/

And don't miss his Star Trek: Next Generation satire!