Page 9 and Redemption
What a shift in tone! I love it. From the drunken yet affable Black Snow giving us his best flirtatious look to some dark room torture. I drew this one much faster than any of the previous pages, and from a technical standpoint it is a lot simpler than any of those. Not nearly as many layers and a much less complex background. Yet I think it’s just as good.
In fact Alex really complimented my drawing and felt the need to tell me how good it looked, something fairly rare. So what are we looking at here? Two new characters! Arthur and the man you’ll come to know as Redemption. I’m very excited by Redemption, and took some time coming up with his character design. A bible thumping super villain? I’m in.
If you couldn’t tell, his look is largely inspired by the knights of the crusades. What’s up with his face? I don’t want to reveal too much, I’ll just say he’s a very interesting character with a detailed back-story and a role to play.
I’m actually not so into the whole bible babble stuff, as I usually glaze over that type of thing. I think Alex did a really good job in this scene making it interesting and convincing (I don’t just mean this page). He wrote some really good stuff, some of which has been cut to make the scene shorter. Don’t fret, we plan on using some of it later. I will take credit for thinking up the awesome name though. Redemption! So many levels of meaning, it will be great.
For some reason we seem to return to the bible often, here with a zealot and in I’m Famous! with regular mocking. Couldn’t tell you why. We aren’t religious guys.
Lets talk about Arthur for a moment. I think he turned out really well, and is our first black character in the story. We plan on having quite a few more black characters this time around in an attempt to more accurately represent Detroit.
Detroit’s population has declined 25% in the last decade (according to last year’s census), as the car factories continued to close down people abandoned the city. Of that population, 713,777 people, the race breakdown is 82.7% Black, 10.6% White, 1.1% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 3.0% other races, 2.2% two or more races. In addition, 6.8% of the population self-identified as Hispanic or Latino. Basically, that’s a damn high percentage of black people, in what is still one of the largest cities in America. So we aim to try to represent that.
So look forward to that…and more torture!