(198X) Full-Color Splashes

Every factional army book in Firelock 198X has splash art pages interspersed throughout--around four or five per book, complementing the text-based supplementary lore pages and minor illustrations here and there. Generally these splash pages are done in the same style as the rest of the army book art. One per faction, though, is rendered in a different style and in full color, and is an effort at indirectly portraying the faction's culture rather than simply depicting their forces in the field.

Presently I've finished three of these: the Santagrines, the Ebon Forest, and the Rygoles'. The Federal special splash is still coming together at the conceptual level.

1. Army of the Ebon Forest

The Ebon Forest's piece is based on Japanese ukiyo-e: specifically, some Meiji-era expel-the-foreigner pieces. The lupar, while mainly inspired by Celtic and Germanic barbarians, also have no small amount of Japanese to them; their Regency's rise to power is in many ways inspired by the Meiji Restoration, and their attitude toward their Federal enemies in tune with the gradual falling-out between Japan and America in the decades before WW2.

The natural subject matter for the piece was a White Glove; their dress uniforms (and, likely, those of the AEF as a whole) are patterned after those of the Japanese infantry in the First Sino-Japanese War:

My first instinct was to portray a sprawling battle scene in similar form. Many wartime pieces like this had a three-panel arrangement that seemed perfectly suited to the page-shaped splashes I was doing. My gut led me to go for a closer-up, more personal scene: a grapple between two combatants. There I was reminded of a print I'd seen dating from a few decades prior:

This particular piece lended a lot to the lupar splash: the background, a lot of the color selection, and the goggling, ugly, hairy faces of the Americans. It also provided an excellent stylistic reference. The chunky, flowing anatomy--particularly the fingers--was a lot of fun to draw.

 Originally the Federal was to be missing his floppy cap. It occurred to me after the fact that not only was it supposed to conceal a helmet underneath, the man was also a paratrooper. So his chinstrap saved him at least some dignity in the end.

This was an interesting experiment in anatomy too. I normally draw lupar as inhumanly lanky, but White Gloves are extremely well-supplied and fed stimulant addicts, and this is a propaganda piece. The challenge was in making the dogface powerfully built while retaining that creepy, inhuman arrangement. I'm not fully sure I succeeded; maybe a skinnier waist with a more accentuated ribcage bottom, on second glance.

The main diversion in subject matter, despite both being pieces meant to glorify the native combatant against his foreign adversary, is in the "thickness" of the propaganda. I think lupar, as part of their constant fixation on demonstrating their humanity, are very big on high art and culture. They'd have a term for the kind of lower-class striver who goes to the theater or learns ice dancing just to demonstrate how refined he is. So, even their state propaganda has to have some layers to it; something worth stopping in front of the poster, one corner flapping in the cold wind, to contemplate as you walk home from work.

The White Glove is strong, focused, and brave; but he can also bleed, and his Federal foe, as outmatched as he is, would gladly die to take his enemy down. Even still, it's a "clean" image. The blood is tastefully minimal, and the White Glove chooses to dramatically hoist his enemy overhead rather than simply brutally maul him. The choice of a Federal Expeditionary in the first place--the crack troops of the flat-faced men, who stand better odds in close quarters than common grenadiers--was also deliberate. FedEx probably shows up routinely in lupar art and cinema as a visually-striking and genuinely dangerous enemy to best.

I've been asked before if lupescript means anything: no, I'm not crazy enough to do conlangs (yet!). It's a sort of continuous doodle based on some dim recollections of some ancient Irish(?) script. I freely portray it either horizontally or vertically; sometimes, in the former, I try to make the entire block of "text" mutually connected and indistinguishable as separate words. I think of lupar speech along similar lines: messy, flowing growls that take some self-discipline and education to make easily understandable. (How jealous they are of the flat-faced men and their staccato--how those Federals sound like telegraphs when they speak!)

2. Atom Barons of Santagria

 This is a fairly basic medieval manuscript impression. It's not indicative of some artistic devolution on the Santagrines' part, but rather a deliberate LARP (as with so many other things in their culture): an attempt to render modernity in a highly stylized and archaic fashion. Rifle platoons and dispersed lupar squads, tanks exchanging fire in the hills, the unearthly snap-hum of a Santagrine star-shell achieving criticality: all are flattened into massed ranks and lines of cannon barrels like lances.

This was interesting to draw. I had to consciously pick and choose what I was allowed to "properly" render. For example, in keeping with something I noticed in a lot of manuscript art (on the Hussites and other early handgunners): none of the guns are drawn in any proper perspective. They're flat up until the muzzle, where they get rounded out. Similarly, the middle of the infantry formations are just piles of helmets (or tagged ears) with no visible weapons; no effort was made to space them out. They represent massed ranks only in the abstract sense.

The lupar were a natural enemy choice; they're a ton of fun to draw in different artstyles that accentuate some different monstrousness each time. This time I wanted to give them flicking tongues and gargoyle faces. Their comparative uniformity to the Santagrines ended up giving them a nice heel-menace.

The fallen Santagrine grenadier was originally intended to be just one of many corpses on both sides. But I ran low on space and didn't want to confuse the silhouettes of the massed guns with things underneath them. Alone, as the first man to die, he seems strangely lionized by the Santagrine artist: a sort of modern Arnold von Winkelried, maybe, who was the first man through a defended doorway, machine pistol in hand.

The marginalia at the bottom make sense to those who know.

3. New Rygolic Host

 This is a pretty big departure from the "self-depictions" of the previous two factions: this is clearly not a piece drawn by some construct, or even a human Rygoman, but rather an informational poster in a Federal military manual on their man-machine foes (read: the Rygo army book).

Construct brains, though ruggedized and firm to the touch, are not hobbled. They are capable of the full range of human experience, reasoning, and emotion. Over time, they can develop into people in their own right, rather than polite blank slates with a childlike awe for the mundane and unerring marksmanship. The same can't be said for the rest of their bodies.

Construct organs are hypersimplified. They have tissue fuel ("ichor"; their sludgey black blood); a system to distribute it (their blood vessel network and a turbine heart); and an organ to store and process fuel (an "ichorium" equating to a human stomach). In their throat they have an object that makes speech possible. That's it. No lungs, no viscera, a broadly empty body cavity. Just bone, musculature, and skin; and what's broken can generally be replaced in the field. I call them "man-machines" for a reason. Machines built in the image of man, or men laid out like machines--eye of the beholder.

The turbine heart's RPM specs are taken from my 2004 Subaru Forester's engine.