Comic for Thursday April 13th, 2006

"Drink down your gin and kerosene" Wednesday - April 12th, 2006

I really meant to put up Tom's Dev sheet up next in the series of dev sheets, but I can't seem to find it. I apologize to all the Tom fans out there. However here is Key's Dev sheet in its place and while Key has come a long way the spirit of what I was trying to capture still comes through. I am however very happy with the way Key's hair came out in that one pose with her in the collared shirt. It's interesting to note the come over hair pulled back in a pony tail of the upper right hand pose never appeared anywhere else besides on this dev sheet. I think the bottom left picture ended up being the basis for Key's hair and so you'll always see that sort of widow's peak in almost every Key I draw.

On a side note, I really tried hard not to make these super sexy chicks in my comics. Kelly and Sydney were the curvy girls and Key and Julienne were meant to be the thinner girls. The weird thing is that Julienne has become very curvy and I think it was an after effect of working on the pinup style art I was experimenting in for Fighting Spirit. I might tone it down in future comics or just explain it as sudden hormone spurts. Conversely Izumi seems kinda busty in places and then she almost looks scaled back a bit. I had created the character with two people in mind and was going to go towards one person, but circumstances arose where I needed to change the person they were based off of so there's an example of the bad parts of creating characters based off people you know.

Anyway I started sketching things again. I need to come up with a design for the Spirit 300 limited edition poster. I have two designs in mind and if my heart would pull itself together I might be able to get them on paper. One would be more of a group of 8 characters standing and the other would be more of a couple of framed shots of the characters. I might post them here and see what people would like to see more. let's keep the fingers crossed that I get my head and heart into it and draw them over the weekend and have them up for voting next week. I think once I can draw the poster and get it done it would be like getting back on the horse and starting the comic again would be close behind.

Thanks for sticking with me guys. Even if NS gets huge or not, I'll always remember this core group of fans who aw me through this rough time in my life. I really don't think I'd be here writing and thinking about a poster and creating the comic again if it wasn't for you guys. Instead of not coming back or sending messages about where the comic is I have gotten nothing but positive messages about people who are concerned and care not about the comic so much but about me. You guys are awesome!!

River is.