It's HAPPENIN' - Road to PINAPL pt. 1

WHATTUP

So here we go. I have things written to a point that I need to start REALIZING these characters to go further.

There have been MANY versions of this character in the past: "CRACKER", "COPS", "CRACKER-KUN" a lot of variations of "CRACKER" for whatever dumbass reason (I actually really like crackers and the word cracker is hella funny to me and i like naming characters after foods yakno) but for this FINAL VERSION of the comic, i skipped it. 

So here we have VAL. His name now has some meaning to it which you can probably glean from the image. Anyway, it will be explained in the comic. 

Design-wise, I'm going for a kinda blank-slate "Goku"-ish character. A bit of a traditional hero avatar, but with my usual flair. He's a sturdy tough guy with a sense of humor, who has an unfortunate tragic past. Yada yada, but he also has to carry a PINAPL around for reasons unknown to you at this time. 

Aesthetically he is inspired by Mars Volta frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Jack White of the White Stripes. Swaggery, sinewy rock n roll dudes with poofy black hair. 

Val is a "BLACK KNUCKLE WARRIOR" trained by a dude in those ways to protect his fellow humans from the "UMBRAFIEND" that now infest his city. 

Who is the shot-caller amongst these "Umbrafiend"? This guy: 

I'm very pleased with this drawing for various reasons. The primary one being that it shows how my style has developed, currently. There are areas here that make me giddy. Particularly the omission of Vinovoglia's entire right arm lol. I get to these places with these drawings, a good SHAPE RATIO, just very visually pleasing to me, and then an ARM comes up like "i'm gonna make this all ugly coz anatomically i HAVE to be here" so THIS TIME i was like "fuck u anatomically i just won't draw this arm lol" 

Expect to see a lot more of that as we continue. Probly in the comic too. The ETHOS behind that is that I just want to execute my ideas and the NOTION of them as quickly and eloquently as I can, and still have it look good (to me, at least). "Traditional" notions of "complete" be darned! 

As for Vino himself--  In my mind he was always looking like Debura from DBZ. A pretty basic "Evil villain" archetype. Imposing and bad ass:

But I intended to add my usual flair-- His personality also needed more development. 

Then I watched an interview with Daniel Day-Lewis about There Will Be Blood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEasXz5cZKM&t=73s

Absolutely loved his FLORAL SHIRT in this interview. And it occured to me a mix of Daniel Day-Lewis, say, "BILL THE BUTCHER" (Gangs of New York) version, WITH that exact flower shirt, would be pretty badass. And indeed it is.

Stemming (lol) from that, I developed an entire backstory for Vinovoglia that involves flowers, women, his garden. A bunch of radical and crazy shit. YOU WILL SEE. 

+ + + 

A fair amount of you that follow me most likely know that PINAPL is an old, old comic of mine! It was basically a "webcomic" back in tha day then was included in an Image Comics anthology called "Popgun", with glorious colors by Dylan McCrae. 

So yeah, PINAPL has been with me for a while. Those old pages basically serve as a Proof of Concept of PINAPL. The general idea, vibe, feel. It's basically a "journey" story, with a quirky mcguffin (the pinapl), with a very video gamey progression to it, in the way that VAL attains items, meets important allies, and journeys along his quest in "stages" that he kinda unlocks. 

Having a long time to let it marinate in my mind, I'm taking those base elements and adding layers to this. That base is a good start, now I'm developing the characters further-- letting them effect the story or vice versa. 

It's going well! I will probably be busting out more of these character drawings as I continue to develop the script!