THUNDERTHIGH Behind the Scenes

My name is Nothing. Jo Nothing. I have certain set of skills. This post, if you choose to accept it, will fill you in on all the background workings of my process for THUNDERTHIGH.

Concept:

Ah, THUNDERTHIGH. It was in development for quite a while. The commissioner and I started work on the story for this way back in December of last year! We knew we wanted to riff on Live and Let Die and we knew we wanted to do raceswap in the comic, but we had to make sure it was respectful. Racially, I'm black and white so I felt at least a little comfortable working on a piece involving a white person turning black. I wanted to avoid harmful stereotypes which I see pretty much ALL THE TIME in raceswap stories in this community. So that meant no dialectical speech patterns, no obvious racism, no colorism, etc. And that's before we even got to the voodoo aspect. Luckily I was provided an excellent source of knowledge about the various loa and how they operate in the actual faith, not the sensationalized version that the west still harmfully portrays. I'm not saying that my little smut comic about turning boys into girls is super progressive or anything, but the bar is basically on the floor and I think we cleared it. I think mixing in tarot to the equation kept us on track and allowed us to rely on other mysticism and iconography when the story needed it.

Early Days:

So I originally grabbed a bunch of outfit concepts I wanted to try and fit in the comic. This was when the spy character was going to go through various personality switches as well as transformations. One I really liked is from a Beyonce video. 

She was originally going to end up as a femme fatale that worked for the crime boss like an assassin. But that was scrapped.

Visual Development:

I did some early sketching too, to figure out what the spy looked like, as well as what the mood of the piece would be. The first picture is when I was trying to pitch that the spy should be black from the start as I got kind of scared. We're now in June of this year, by the way. The second picture is sort of a sample scene, not really one to take seriously. You can see I'm already playing with color here. (This was before we had figured out not to use harmful dialectical patterns so sorry for the cringe dialogue.)

Yikes.

There was also the question of the James Bond element. My commissioner really wanted to see some of the old 60s-70s spy fiction imagery put into the piece. So she sent me a selection of images like a mood board which I was able to draw from for The Saint's base.

The Process:

So working on this comic was a bit of a rollercoaster. I started out with a big visual idea, which quickly fell away as my enthusiasm drained. I wanted to have color slowly fill the spy's world as he transformed more and more. But eventually I just started making full color pages. Then I regained my confidence about halfway through and finished with another strong visual idea, which happened to coincide with the original concept that I started out with. I used the psychedelic color palette to illustrate that the world Agent 63 now found himself in was actually magical in nature. This high-energy color scheme ended up dovetailing nicely into the greytone beginnings.

The Cover:

That painted cover was a last-minute addition. I finished the final comic page and sat with it for a moment and realized I wasn't done. Something was missing. That something was a kickass 007-style poster that sort of told you what was going to happen in the story, but not really. It was more about conveying vibes. I sourced Live and Let Die's poster, as well as Thunderball since I was referencing its name already.

Conclusion:

All in all, I'm very happy with how THUNDERTHIGH came out. This project was a challenge. There were several moments where I lost my nerve about the whole thing, but I managed to pull through. I doubt I'll make a comic exactly like this ever again, but it feels like a good stepping stone towards what I'd like to do in the future. Thanks for reading!