These are the finalish character designs for this year’s abandoned graphic novel project. I say “finalish” because, until I had actually started penciling the story pages I’m sure that we would have made more adjustments. The big guy’s artificial eye’s final design was still being worked out. The uniform probably would have gotten a tweek or two.

Am I likely to ever use these designs for characters in a project of my own?

Mostly not. They were designed with a specific story in mind and so, with one exception, they’re not likely to continue living in my imagination. The one exception is the monster. I’ve gotten found of the critter. I can’t use it for any version of this story – the writer owns the plot – but I can imagine it turning up in other places.

I had mentioned recently that I expected a chunk of my time this year to be caught up in drawing a graphic novel.

Sigh.

That time has been freed up. The writer and I have, amicably, agreed to abandon the project due to that old standby – creative differences. We were both enthusiastic about the story but, unfortunately, we were enthusiastic about different, and incompatible, versions of the story. So he’s keeping his story, perhaps to have another artist illustrate, and I’m keeping my character designs.

And since I like posting stuff on this weblog I’m showing those designs to you. Today’s post is the initial character designs. I did a number of preliminary sketches prior to these where I worked to distill the characters into individuals that I could draw multiple times from multiple angles. The uniforms that these folks are wearing didn’t survive this stage. The chest pockets looked okay on the guys but terrible on the women.