Peter Pan

Since it now looks as if it will be a long time coming before Peter Pan gets to join the cast of Fables -- if ever -- I decided I might as well finally share this character design drawing with you, since it won't likely ever see publication elsewhere. Some of you might recall seeing the character design sketches I did to accompany the original Fables proposal. They were published in the back of the second Fables collection. This depiction of Peter Pan as the Adversary was among them when I first submitted the proposal to DC/Vertigo. It depicts Peter as not only the Adversary, but as the Emperor too. Unlike Geppetto, Peter never would have been content with simply being the anonymous power behind the throne -- behind thousands of thrones.

        In showing Peter among select members of his corrupt and sybaritic court, I was trying for a hint of the look of a young Christopher Plummer, playing the evil emperor Commodus in the 1964 Fall of the Roman Empire (of which the hit movie Gladiator -- at least in the first third -- was nearly a shot-by-shot remake). Plummer captured and portrayed a truly creepy villain. Joaquin Phoenix, for all of his skills and talents, couldn't come close to Plummer's note-perfect portrayal of the same character. Then again, Richard Harris, giant of a man that he was, couldn't match Alec Guinness in the role of Marcus Aurelius. Gladiator had two strikes against it from the get go.

        But back to Peter: Actually, I'm not sure I have anything more to say about this subject or this sketch for now, so I guess I'll let you go early today.

More bad elves...

When I was writing the afore-mentioned unfinished novel, I was posting the finished chapters online, on the old Clockwork Storybook site (long defunct).

        One of the fellows reading said posts posited that my elves looked to be a weird cross between American Indians and Scottish highlanders. That seemed a fair observation.

        The couple on the far left are a rare species of elf called Herne Elves, for what I imagine are obvious reasons.

That there's a bad elf...

The gentleman on the right has killed twelve men in battle. How do we know this? Well, that's what the title says, true, but it's all about the braids in his hair. Years ago, in an unfinished novel, I posited a highly warlike culture among elves, and one of the ways in which they show their battlefield accomplishments is by adding a braid in their hair for every opponent they've killed in battle. Of course with the more successful of these long-lived warriors they might run out of hair long before they run out of dead enemies that need honoring. So they have attachments that show one braid equals ten dead enemies, or a hundred dead enemies, and so on.

        This fellow is wearing one braid with a ten-dead-opponents sigil, plus two single-opponent braids. Therefore he's claiming twelve enemies killed in battle. Tough little guy, huh?

        Matthew Sturges, my friend and longtime writing partner (and future Fine Fellow here -- bet on it) borrowed, with my blessing, this practice for one of the characters in his excellent novel Midwinter, which was published once in very limited release some years ago, but a substantially new version of which is due out in a major release from Pyr Press later this year. He also borrowed my notion that the reason the queen of fairy is often called Titania and other times called Mab is because they are two separate individuals, one of which is queen of the seelie court (Titania) and the other queen of the unseelie court (Mab). In fact Matt was so busy borrowing ideas I left lying around that I was able to lift his wallet without getting caught. Okay, that was a joke. Not a big joke, mind you, or even a funny one, but a joke nonetheless. One day we'll try to add up all of the good ideas I've borrowed from Matt. It's the nature of our business. When it's done above board and openly, it's a sign of the generosity and general goodwill among folks in our racket. When it's done clandestinely, surreptitiously and without permission, it's a sign that a new Harry Potter novel is about to be published.

        Okay, now that was a much better joke.

        But seriously, folks, the reason I point this out is to mark a bit of territory, so that later, when my own prose work comes out using the same ideas, I'll have this item to point to, to demonstrate that I don't steal all of my best ideas from Matt -- just most of them.

        My sketchbooks in this period of time show many examples of tough, warlike elves, so this must have been when I was beginning to work up ideas for that as yet unfinished novel (which I won't name here, since it needs substantial reworking before -- if ever -- it sees the light of day). The notion of very tough elves -- as opposed to the prissy, twee, fancy-pants, emo versions in so many other fantasy worlds -- is not new to me. Not by a long shot. My first exposure to the idea was with Ralph Bakshi's cult favorite animated feature Wizards. It's a very flawed, but still remarkable, film.

Sketchbook Stuff

Okay, so the reason I'm posting so much sketchbook stuff today is that I had to learn to scan and import images this afternoon, and in the process thereof, convert said images to jpegs, so that I could park them somewhere on my computer and have them available to attach to emails. This may seem like a simple undertaking to most people, but I am among the least computer-intuitive creatures alive and learning how to do this sort of thing doesn't at all come easy to me.

        But there were an important couple of images I had to scan and have ready to send off to DC Comics tomorrow, for a new project in the works -- about which more later. And my usual do-everything-for-me-computer-friend was at work today (Hi, Brad). So, with a little bit of help and guidance from him, snuck in over the phone between important grownup man in a grownup job duties, I had to mostly suss out how to do this myself.

        Once those two actual bits of business were taken care of, I didn't want to lose this new hard won skill set, so I broke out one of my sketchbooks and started scanning pages, to retain by repetition this bold new ability in my old-dog-can't-learn-new-tricks sort of life.

        I don't think I have anything to say about any of the actual images on this page of doodles, other than I may want to someday find a use for the funny little gobliny creature in the lower part of the page.

Sketchbook Stuff

I'm not sure I have anything to comment about this sketchbook page of doodles. These are all done originally in pencils of course. Then, back when I was producing a good deal of comic art -- back in the Ironwood and Coventry days -- I would warm up my inking hand by first inking a few of the sketches in one of my sketchbooks. That's how the majority of them came to be inked, and that's where I tried out new inking a pencilling styles.

Sketchbook Stuff

Many of the members of the so-called Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that came along decidedly post Raphael by the way, kept drawing this one woman named Jane Morris. Some used her as the model for whatever painting they were doing, while she simply shows up in the sketchbooks and discardia of others. When I finally ran across an actual photograph of Miss Jane Morris, I understood why, and had to copy it for myself. Captivating woman.

        At this time I was just beginning to get a wildness to my brushstroke that I liked and continued to pursue and develop. If I can ever recapture it someday -- it faded when I stopped drawing as much as I was doing back then -- I'm going to try to introduce it to my comics work. Assuming I can ever get around to drawing comics again.

Sketchbook Stuff

In the very same sketchbook, which was started at least two years before I began to think about the series Pantheon -- so this would have been around 1989 or '90, but don't hold me to that because my time sense is a bit spotty in some areas -- I also drew this character whom I called Fortress America. In fact, I had the name Fortress America first and tried to design an image to fit, unlike in the case of Dynasty, where I had the image in mind first and eventually found a name and an identity to fit. An armored character who has the word 'fortress' as part of his name has to be big and solid, and I think this fellow fit the bill nicely.

        As you can begin to see, with this and the previous post, when I began to think about the series Pantheon, I went shopping among my old notes and sketchbooks for characters to people it with. If you're going to write or draw comics, or both, you have to keep notebooks and/or sketchbooks. This seems a no-brainer, but it took me a while to figure that much out.

Sketchbook Stuff

This is my first run at drawing the character Dynasty, who would later star in the 13 issue maxi series Pantheon, published by Lone Star Press. I'm still quite fond of this design and by this time I was beginning to get results I liked with the inking brush. Of course, by this time I had no idea who the character was or that she'd be named Dynasty. I only had an image in my mind of the dragon symbol wrapped around one leg, before showing up on her chest, where most self-respecting superhero symbols appear.

        I think it's sort of humorous that several critics of the Pantheon series went out of their way to point out what they considered a mistake in the character design, because the woman was clearly (East) Indian, but the dragon design was obviously Asian. Apparently, according to these critics, I don't know one culture from another. So let's get this straight: American superheroes can adopt all sorts of symbology from other cultures, but non-American superheroes are required to stick within the culture of their origin -- period. Got it. Understood.

        Do I work in a silly profession, or what?

        By the way, the character to the left of Dynasty was going to be a superhero called Unicorn -- part of the super team called The Bestiary. But the Bestiary never actually made an appearance in Pantheon. I intended them to, but simply ran out of room. Though they were referred to once or twice in other character's dialogue, they ended up on the funnybook equivalent of the cutting room floor. That happens.