Phoshii

A bit on Kirby’s origin. I love the idea of Kirby’s species being some sort of sentient cosmological phenomenon; I think, particularly in Kirby’s case, it plays into the galaxy theming of the series (and I mean. He’s literally “of the stars”), and it’s also a neat way to effectively just limit his history as a character to basically just being on Popstar.

Whether or not this holds true for the series? Idk. Kirby is described as a “young traveller”, which does seem to imply he has some history before Popstar/Dreamland, but the “traveller” title was also given to Void Termina who Just Got Born, so that’s a moot point ig.

I also really wanted to include Morpho in these first couple scenes, as both a reference to the butterflies that appeared when Kirby first appeared in Kirby's Adventure, as well as how Shinya Kumazaki included them in his Star Allies celebration artwork (i.e. the same game which turned that butterfly into something far more important). I like the idea of rebirth as being important to Kirby's backstory, so I thought it was important to include Morpho here.

IDK where Kirby got the bindle cloth from. In my head, it has apples in it. Here's a separate artwork of mine which inspired that last image in particular.

Now here’s where I wanted to start incorporating a bit of a narrative. Kirby sets out to explore this new world, and stumbles upon a bunch of Waddle Dees running with plates of food. He just manages to spot one of the smallest Dees trip and fall, dropping their plate and ruining the food.

Maybe he goes up to them and tries to figure out what’s going on. He’s probably hungry. Once he knows, he hands off his bindle to the smallest Dee, as a replacement for his ruined foodstuffs, and rushes off to Castle Dedede. Wonder whether that was the start of anything important…

Kirby faces off with King Dedede. Gave Dedede a wide stance here to imply that he’s gloating. He’s gloating at some guy who just got born. Definitely some room for character development here.

And, after returning the food to the citizens of Dreamland from the greedy King, it was their love and appreciation which gave Kirby his colour. I know Kirby was always supposed to be pink, but I like this idea, since it parallels a certain someone and is a neat way to incorporate the Western box art mishap into the continuity of the series. It’s just nice. It also makes past kirby a bit more visually distinct from present Kirby, which I needed for this PMV.

I wanted to show the development of Kirby’s core friendships here. Now Kirby is full of love (awwww), he’s gotta direct that love somewhere! And I think the obv targets are the not-yet members of the quartet. So, each scene is dedicated to some important point in their past.

Meta Knight at his worst, chasing Kirby through the crumbling Halberd after thwarting his coup attempt. Bandee on the sidelines, caught between siding with his King, and siding with his friend. Dedede, possessed by dark matter AGAIN.

Ultimately, Kirby has stood by them no matter what. I matched it up with the lyrics here in the sense that he’s “saving” them from the edge of the night (this is a bit more literal in Dedede’s case, but we’ve already kinda seen him at his worst, so I thought it was unnecessary to touch on that again. Kirby has stuck by his side through thick and thin! I think that’s important to include here.)

I thought really hard about what Kirby would have in his room. I always assumed that, in KATFL, his room was so clean because a) it was just built, and b), he was barely in there anyways. So I made it a bit of a mess. He borrowed (stole) a tea-set from Dedede’s castle, and he’s using one of the cups as a paintbrush holder. There’s also a picture frame on the fireplace mantel with his friends from 64. Drawings of his friends, food, Zero… it’s cute. Does Kirby have a kitchen?

For Kirby's doodles, I basically just redrew them from the Kirby Art and Styles book I have. So yes, this is how he draws. I found it so cute I almost cried.

I did also think about the order his friends appeared in the doorway:

Bandee is first. I feel like that should be an obvious choice. Bandee has like, little to no grudge against Kirby, and Bandee being Kirby’s best friend seems to be the direction they’re taking in the games. Other than ties to Dedede, he has no real reason to be hesitant about being friends with Kirby. That’s Player 2!

Dedede seemed like the next obvious choice. I think that by Kirby 64, they had both gotten over the “enemies” bit and upgraded to “frenemies”. Maybe it’s not the most positive possible relationship, but I think it requires a certain level of closeness that you can’t get by being just “enemies”. You also can’t not be friends with someone if you both had to go through the plot of 64 I think.  Where’s that post about “if you are rivals for 30 years, you are no longer rivals, you are found family” again?

They’re definitely friends by KRtD. It was the first Kirby game I ever played, and it most definitely left me with the impression that they’re friends, so I guess that's just how I feel about their dynamic overall.

This leaves Meta Knight last. This, again, made the most sense to me, but I feel like it deserves more justification since it’s kind of the least immediately obvious. He spends Kirby’s Adventure basically prepping Kirby to fight Nightmare, but with as much interpersonal distance as you could possibly manage. “Yeah so I’m not gonna inform this kid of what’s really coming his way and that the King’s plan is a temporary fix at best, and is ultimately fated to fail. I’ll just throw some sweets at him from a distance then fight him about it later” alright buddy. 

Also, I feel like Meta Knight’s Revenge is such a low point for his character, that I couldn’t really see Kirby and Meta Knight being close for a period of time after that. Not even Dedede ever got quite that antagonistic.

It takes a good while for MK to take a positive active role in the series, even longer than Dedede iirc. MK also seems like the type to take a while to open up (if his hangup with his mask is anything to go by), so making him the last Friend makes sense to me. By no means do I think this represents how much Kirby considers MK a friend though; Kirby has boundless love to give. 

Friendship montage! I feel like the purpose of this sequence is obvious. In these games, Kirby’s driven by his love for his friends + planet to be a protector, and his friendships are put at the forefront of the plot (excepting the final one, which I will get into shortly).

I chose to have Kirby alone in these scenes, since you can technically fight Void Soul alone AND the colours have a nicer contrast with Kirby’s pink. It’s also more solemn that way, since it’s the climax of the PMV. Yeah IK i used the wrong Void Termina colour palette since I used Void Soul, but I like the colours of regular Void Termina more.

I was kinda afraid I’d get flamed for this sequence since people take the relationship between Kirby and Void very seriously, but I think people got the message here. Kirby sees himself in Void, quite literally. I think that’s the direction the games were trying to go; an understanding of Void’s present, and its potential, enriches an understanding of who Kirby is today, and his past. It’s clear that any sort of potential species-level connection, if it even exists, will remain vague at best for the future. I think I honestly like it that way more… it makes it more fun to speculate.

KSA is ultimately a game about the origins of Kirby (as both a character and series), whether you take it literally or not. This was one of the scenes I came up with first, which is why I chose to make past Kirby white. The 'spring breeze' theming of Void’s many pause screen descriptions is so important to me, and I wanted to make that connection more obvious here. They are parallels! Foils! Kirby is so full of love! And ‘Void’ literally means nothing. A perfectly blank slate. Kirby defeating Void is so tragic because it’s clear that Void, with love and friendship, could have turned out just like Kirby. Not even in a “positive/negative energy” way; just in the sense that love and kindness is something we all need, no matter who we are. 

On the topic of headcanons, I’ll admit that I love takes on Kirby’s backstory which incorporate some sort of wishy-washy species-level connection between Void and Kirby, but I kept it similarly vague here so as to not ruin this PMV for anyone who dislikes this take. It’s definitely not the way I was thinking about it when I was drawing it. This is my official disclaimer…

And it was all… just a dream? What’s that weird butterfly doing there lol.

I didn’t really want to focus on Kirby and the Forgotten Land all that much, since it doesn’t really have the sort of focus on Kirby that would feel important to include in this PMV. Whatever’s going on with Elfilis and the Ancients is what speaks to me a little more in these games, so I didn’t include it in a PMV which focuses more on Kirby’s character and the core themes of the series at large.

Also, it’s dawn here. I think KATFL is the start of something new for the Kirby series, which I wanted to represent thematically/visually. It also took me ages to get Kirby’s weird little house looking right.

My roommate’s one complaint with this scene is that Meta Knight was not present aurafarming on the colosseum. In my defence I think he’s having breakfast somewhere.

I just love Kirby so much man. Kirby has been my earliest interest, my first video game, and what have you. I love the series to death, and it makes me so happy that so many other people felt the same way. When I first started making this, I genuinely thought that its range of appeal would be pretty narrow, simply because I made the sort of thing that was so tailored to exactly what I wanted to see someone else make. I’m glad that everyone else liked it too :]

as a treat, here's the test-run I made for the pmv. It's uploaded on my side account on instagram @pastelaeqy (where i was also posting wips for the thing the entire time lol. Not to self advertise or whatever but I tend to be way more active on that side account in particular and I do post lots of Kirby stuff like. All of the time. Including things I have not posted here.)

So first off, I used photo references for all the houses in that comic. I was taught the graph method for working off photos, but I don’t really enjoy it.

(This is the graph method, where you overlay a graph onto both your paper and the image you’re working off of, then chart where objects are supposed to be):

I don’t like doing that because 1) if I’m working off a photo, it’s not because I want my art to look like exactly like the photo, I want the photo to jog my memory of how it felt to be there, and 2) I get lost in the details and forget to enjoy making art.

Instead, I make the photo reference smaller, look at the basic shapes/values in the composition, and start drawing those. Because I’m working off shapes in the beginning, I like to think I end up with better silhouettes. Then I fill in the details.

I definitely did not make this up, it's an amalgamation/simplification of different cartooning techniques!

Couple other things:

It’s not just the roundness of the car, it’s what it’s surrounded by. The squares and triangles in the rest of the image make the car pop more

If you trace the basic lines of the car, the lines aren’t just curved, most of them come together at the same point. When your eye looks at the car, then, it goes in a circle:

(AKA, there are a lot of tiny round things in this bigger round thing that make it look rounder.)

I’ll frequently make up for not being very detailed/precise in my art by relying on shapes & values (although I’m trying to work on detail it’s just a time thingggg 🙏). It lets you get away with a lot

These are all panels that read well because there are clear shapes and black & white values that guide your eyes through them, but don’t zoom in.

Here are some great value/composition resources of various lengths/forms that I think about a lot:

Framed Ink (one of the cartoonist bibles): https://archive.org/details/framed-ink-drawing-composition-for-visual-storytellers-marcos-mateu-mestre

How to Think About Composition by my beautiful instagram mutual @ot3: https://ko-fi.com/s/ce521163c3

David Aja panel breakdown (Elsa does an amazing job of showing how different elements of a comic page affect the movement of your eye through it): https://youtu.be/Peu6lw0nido?si=eA1cd7F4mkruKc3F