Weekly Update - 100

First I'd like to welcome Natani, our newest subscriber! Thank you so much for your support!

It's also apparently Weekly Update 100, so... shit. Feels like I should do something special. Had no plans though. Um... here, have a second preview image. Who is this guy? I'll explain it in the Ramble, because it's actually quite interesting to me how he came to exist! Maybe someone else will find it interesting too!

Comic This Week: I've fallen a bit behind, but I'm pretty sure I can get it done by Wednesday.

Drawing: New TWC vote incentive, Page 131, 132 and storyboarding near pages

Reading: Best Served Cold (I should really just sit down and finish it)

Playing: Satisfactory? But mostly drawing.

Ramble:

Minor spoilers ahead, I suppose, since this is being posted a few days before you meet this character. You can skip this ramble if you don't want me to taint your opinions about him.

So... this guy in the second image above. Keen observers might have noticed that last week's comic post here on Patreon tagged him by the name "Snake."

Thing is, this is one of those characters who has been planned to be included in the comic for a long time, but here we are, it's time for him to appear in the comic, and as of last week I really didn't know ANYTHING about him. Which is a weird thing when me, the writer, is telling a story about a character that exists solely in my head but still feels like a stranger to me. I know that the character exists in Kuserra, and I know what he wants and what his role in the story is, but I didn't know hardly anything about him at all. Between this week and last week, I didn't even know what his face looked like. Literally as I was drawing him this week, I decided that the parts of him we cannot see in Page 130 needed to be unique somehow, and I rather like the idea that his appearance has some reptilian elements about it. I like also that there's some greater implications there about how the denizens of Kuserra are not entirely immune to the often toxic effects of their environment, though many have likely adapted some increased resistance to it.... but I DIGRESS!

It happens more often than you might think, though, where colors and designs are finalized by necessity, rather than being planned out well ahead of time. Riley is actually another great example where her color scheme was chosen the day of her first appearance in the story. I had a picture of her in my mind, so I sorta knew already what color she was supposed to be, but there were issues with how poorly it matched my idea for her environment and I've subtly lightened it since then merely because she spends a lot of time in the darkness of her workshop and her original brown was a touch too dark when shadowed.

Okay, so Snake. Who is he? You'll find out soon, but, well, let's rewind a bit because I want to talk about how his appearance and name came to be.

I like snakes and snake-like imagery. I also like villains and anti-heroes and the idea of evil as a literary concept. When a character is trending towards the antagonistic, I find that I tend to use slithery snake-like imagery as a signal for the combination of cunning and amoral activities. It has to do with their sort of cold-blooded, murderous notoriety (even though that reputation is based on old fables and real-life snakes are adorable and cute and snuggly). Ergo there is probably no greater signal to my readers that a character is meant to be "evil" than straight-up naming him "Snake" and giving him a reptilian mutation. But as with all things, it's never quite that simple.

In some version of the first draft for the comic, Donno was more like Snake in his current form. He was without the sort of mutated eye, but he was definitely smaller, more wirey, and more snake-like from an appearance and personality standpoint. In that draft, Donno was meant to be more of a sleezy lowlife, a weaselly kind of fast-talking con artist that existed to make Kiva's life difficult because you can't have a story without conflict. Then, as Donno's role became a bit more clear to me, there was a time where I thought Donno might actually just BE a snake, imagining him for awhile as a massive boa that ruled over his cronies largely with the threat of eating them. Obviously, all of that sort of fell away as Donno slotted more cleanly into a sort of twisted patriarchal/mentorish role for Kiva, and settled into his current form, possibly still with the threat of eating him.

Enter Riley. Here, again, was a side/supporting character that quickly embedded herself deeply into my heart and found her way into the main cast alongside Max and Kiera. As her own story started to grow and take form, I realized there was still space for a character to fill the role Donno was originally intended to fill. Donno was no longer able to fit in that space. He had other problems, other interests, and probably couldn't be bothered to do the things I needed to be done. I needed a sleezy, weaselly sort that existed to make Riley's life difficult, because every good story needs conflict, and Riley's story is no exception. A high level concept alone, however, does not a character make, and as my brain is often wont to do, Snake's role and appearance and shape and story was idly being hammered out in the background while I focused on drawing the pages of Chapter 7.

But even as I was sketching out THIS page I still had no idea WHO this Snake guy was. So as I'm drawing him this week, I'm kind of... meeting this character for the first time. As I'm tracing over his sketch and his face and body are taking form, my brain is asking him questions and coming up with the answers. It is somewhere in this process that my characters find their voice, their wants and hopes and dreams, and their personality traits. And it'll probably be awhile yet before his form and his function and his role really take shape. This is why I'm very much a discovery author, and not a plotter. I write what my characters tell me about themselves. I can't dictate their lives for them.

Now, Snake is meant to be an antagonist for one of my personally most beloved characters, so no one is meant to like him, but I can't write a character that's so one-dimensional as a mustachioed evil-doer that everyone would universally hate (either for being evil or for being one-dimensional). Snake is an antagonist, but he's still a person. And like all the people in this story, he's got his own story as well.  He's just trying to make his shitty life a little less shitty each day, like everyone else.