SR 1 PAGE FIFTY-ONE

I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE drawing big crowds of background characters. 

Except that there’s rarely any time to draw big crowds of background characters. But when there is…HOO BOY. I love getting into each of their heads while I’m drawing them. And with the laborious pencil rendering style I was using at the time, I had plenty of time in those heads. Everyone here is some level of shocked and/or confused, and I think the dude on the far right probably filled his drawers, but look at our buddy Agatha: DELIGHTED. She knows full well that she’s just witnessed something freakin’ amazing, and she’s drinking in the moment.

I aspire to be Agatha.

The woman in front with the lip ring is a recurring background character. Want to play Where’s Waldo/Wally? She appears on one more page in Book One, and one page in Book Three. (BONUS POINTS: We just saw the back of her head a few pages earlier, too.)

SR 1 PAGE FIFTY-TWO

Our first nice, clear look at Sera’s arch-nemesis Stiletta! And her hideous, Venom-like tounge-tacle.

Will it startle you to learn Stiletta was also born at CalArts? It doesn’t? Thank you for paying attention! Yep, she’s another product of quiet late-night brainstorming in my cubicle. The first version of her was absolutely embarrassing, though. Let’s take a look!

WTF is that, some kind of evil Britney Spears mime? Get outta here with that!

I think ca. 1999 Aaron was trying to design the perfect opposite of Serenity. Sera is fragile-looking, while Stiletta is curvaceous. Sera dresses androgynously, while Stiletta is a caricature of femininity. Sera is reserved, while Stiletta is clowny-bold. Sera has a skull necklace, while Stiletta has… an upside-down peace symbol? Why does she have an upside-down peace symbol? Weird. Pretty evil, though, I guess!

It’s not the worst thought process, but taking an “opposite day” approach to your villain is pretty basic. I refined the approach a bit during my extremely angular ZIM-influenced era:

Interesting mix of fluffy softness and jagged metals there. But by the next stage she’d lost pretty much all the fluff:

That’s pretty much where she stuck. The last vestiges of femininity are her Kewpie doll lips and the extremely tall heels. I’m not sure it’s physically possible to stand on bladed heels like that? Doesn’t matter, though; Stiletta is basically always floating.

By the way, I didn’t realize until many years later where Stiletta’s final design came from:

Makes sense.

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

SHOCK CITY book two layouts COMPLETE. The last round of notes was not terribly extensive but was extremely helpful (a good editor seriously makes all the difference). Time to take a short break, squeeze in a few assassinations-for-hire, and get back to comics in about a week.

What’s that? Yeah, assassinations. You didn’t think I paid rent making funnybooks, did you?

NEXT WEEK: WITH ASSISTS BY GOFFLIN!