A final three character portraits from my Oblivion Seas story outline.
The gent on the left is one of the sailors. The young man in the middle is the slave of the merchant featured yesterday. The fellow with the ruined face on the right is someone that our protagonists meet on their way into the sea of weed.
Continuing from yesterday – more Oblivion Seas character portraits.
On the left is the First Mate, if my memory serves me correctly, the narrator of the original novel. In the center is a merchant, one of the Glenn Carig’s passengers. On the right is the merchant’s secretary. Both the merchant and the secretary are my additions to the story.
Today’s, tomorrow’s and the day after tomorrow’s character portraits are all from 2000 or 2001. I was playing around with taking the Sargasso cartoon series idea and turning it into a comic of some sort. Sargasso was inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”. “Inspired by” meaning that I took the general premise of the novel (shipwreck survivors encountering trapped ships and weird monsters in a sea of weed) and headed in a different direction.
Not too different a direction really. I thought the general premise was great but I wanted more weird creatures and more identifiable human characters. Most of the sailors in the story are nameless and even those with names don’t have much in the way of personality.
These portraits were done help me think of characters to populate the story with. I often find it easier to come up with character names and personalities after I’ve come up with character appearances. I don’t think I got as far as naming any of these gentlemen. The big guy on the left would be one of the regular sailors, the bearded fellow would probably be the bosun, and the young chap would be a cabin boy.
More character sketches for Oblivion Seas. I’m not sure who (or what the figure in the top left is). The guy with the muttonchops is the first mate. The kid with the scarred lip is the slave of the guy in the powdered wig. I’d planned to set the series in the mid-1900s or earlier. The masked figure was inspired by Hodgson’s novel The Ghost Pirates
Here are rough sketches of the some of shipwreck survivor characters featured in Oblivion Seas. I remember planning to have about a dozen of them to begin with. Then, of course, I’d start whittling them down as the horrors of the Sargasso took their toll.
Someday I’d like to do the story as a graphic novel. One of many someday projects. Sigh.
Another series that made it to the proposal stage was Oblivion Seas. It was inspired by the writing of William Hope Hodgson, especially the novel The Boats of the Glen Carrig. The series was to feature the adventures of a band of castaways trapped in the Sargasso Sea. One of the menaces that they must overcome were “weedmen”, intelligent amphibious creatures that liked the taste of human blood. Hodgson was somewhat vague in his description of the creatures; they seemed to have aspects of human shape but weren’t strictly humanoid.
This piece was inspired by the stories of William Hope Hodgson. I remember, as a kid, being so disappointed that the real Sargasso Sea wasn’t such a terrifying place. Oh well, maybe the floating continent of trash will make up for it.
This version of the Ghost Pirates was inked and toned all in Photoshop. If I remember correctly the reason Epilogue.net rejected it was because it was too blurry. Since the point of the image was to approximate the pirates walking out of the fog my first reaction was, “Duh! It’s supposed to be blurry!” It’s years later now. My reaction to getting rejected at Epilogue these days is usually just to shrug.
This sketch was inspired by William Hope Hodgson‘s The Ghost Pirates. Hodgson is one of those frustrating authors who has great ideas but is hard to recommend to anyone because he’s not a lot of fun to read. His best work is in short stories. The longer the story the more needlessly dense and repetitive the prose. If you’ve seen Attack of the Mushroom People you’ve seen an adaptation of one of Hodgson’s best short stories The Voice in the Night.
I finished a version of this in Photoshop that was then rejected by Epilogue.net. I’ll post that tomorrow.
I found this earlier version of the Ghost Pirates while I was looking for the completed version. I don’t see any reason to hang onto it so I’m posting it today.
