A Bit on the Side

Throughout this portion of the MA, I've also been experimenting with styles and crossovers. Sometimes I think it helps to have a bit of mindless fun and draw something I like or mess around with some ideas.

My crossover of Pendleton Ward's Adventure Time and Naughty Dog's fantastic The Last of Us.

The first crossover got me some traffic so I felt compelled to do a second.

Experimenting with races and characters from BioWare's Mass Effect series.

And experimenting with cel shading on the protagonist of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Edward Kenway.

All of these are available to see on my Tumblr blog: http://pixelpeepers.tumblr.com/

I was also lucky enough to get in contact with Scott Wegener, the co-creator and artist of the Eisner Award nominated limited series Atomic Robo.

Atomic Robo by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener
Image source: http://media.rvanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/AtomicRobo-Dino.jpg
Last accessed: 8th December 2013

As I have more than a passing interest in comics, I was interested to know what kind of work he did when creating a world for a set of characters within a new IP. Specifically, I asked him whether it was worth starting with a fully defined world for his characters to be a part of or whether the things he wanted his characters to do determined the world they were in:


Wegener responded, "The more you can work out in advance the stronger your work will be. Before we ever started working on the first volume of Atomic Robo we knew who he was, and what the major plot points of his life and development were going to be.

"With a solid framework to hang our work from it has made expanding on those initial ideas, and just making up new stuff, a LOT easier than it would have been if we’d gone in with no plan.

"That basic character arc and world-building helped define the rules of our fictional universe. Are there aliens? No there are not. So no alien stories. Ghosts? Nope. In his early life Robo is pie-eyed and fairly patriotic, like a lot of young people. As he gets older and more experienced he learns not to take things at face vaule. And soforth. 

"We certainly do make up a lot of Robo’s “history” on the fly, but we know what new elements will and will not “feel” right because of that initial work we did."

Even in something as character focussed as Atomic Robo, the rules of the world he's a part of were still defined before the stories could be determined. This kind of made me think that the world itself is just as important in defining a character's capabilities as anything else. In future, I should think about the world in which the characters inhabit and take that into consideration, if i didn't already.

As a "thank you," I did some doodles of Atomic Robo's titular hero.