#crayak

So this was a cool one. @joysweeper commissioned me to do a "missing page" from the Animorphs graphic novel of The Capture, where Jake meets Crayak. I tried to emulate Grine's style as best I could, then got to design Crayak! I LOVE being an Animorphs artist that people reach out to for commissions! Best thing ever!

I'll be honest: I completely missed that, because I was distracted by how Grine chose to portray Temrash 114:

Because I'm torn. I like the way that Jake is the one drawn as a ghost while the Temrash 114 copy is real, which feels like a nice way of conveying who has agency and who is just a voice in one's head. On the other hand... I thought this same idea looked silly in AniTV and I do think it risks looking silly here. Like, here's how they conveyed Jake being trapped in his own mind:

And even that AniTV portrayal is a lot less literal in ways I appreciate. Over Temrash 114 telling Jake "we break humans, the way humans break horses," we get not Jake's face but an image of Tom, sobbing on the floor:

Later on, Temrash announces "I've found the part of your mind... I needed" and we get shown-not-told what's about to happen because a close-up of a tiger fills Jake's mindscape:

Side note: is this footage reused from the opening credits? Sources say probably.

and then we cut to reality, where Jake's body is morphing.

By contrast, the comics' use of this:

...is okay, but it doesn't have nearly as much figurative stuff going on and — in my opinion this is the biggest issue — isn't visually separated enough from the stuff taking place outside Jake's head. Like, one of these panels is set in reality, one is set in Jake's mindscape:

... and if not for the fact that we've already been clued into Temrash 114's art style, you'd never know which is which. There are so dang many floating heads in the Animorphs Graphix that the addition of a few more doesn't stand out. And there are so so many better ways to portray non-literal space, or something happening in a character's mind. Like, see if y'all can guess which of these panels is Jean Grey (Marvel Girl/Phoenix, X-Men) having a literal conversation with another person who is physically present, and which is her having a psychic conversation with another person who is inside her mind:

Even with the limits of 1970s/80s printing technology, there's no question of the literal vs. figurativeness of each scene. Either Animorphs Graphix needs more background in all its other panels to contrast the blank white space that Jake and Temrash inhabit, or else it needs to do something different to contrast their reality from everyone else's. Which, I mean. It's not the 1970s anymore, and comic-printing technology has gone way beyond the primary-color square-panel format since then:

so there are so many more options you could use that aren't just this:

and I never thought I'd say it, but I think I kind of miss the purple mist to convey Jake being a controller.

To be clear: it's extremely possible that the bare-bones drawings of the Animorphs Graphix have exactly the same origin as the floaty purple people from AniTV: budget. In general, these comic adaptations of bestselling novels are being produced on a shoestring budget with an impossibly fast schedule, and publishers see them as naked cash grabs rather than as real comics to be constructed with all the love and care and editorial oversight that goes into an X-Men comic.

That said, Animorphs itself was seen much the same way — hence the lack of censorship for the violence and gore and anti-U.S. commentary — and still became a beautiful work of fiction. But budget is less of an upper limit for novels than it will always be for any kind of visual medium. You can see there is clearly some effort to get details right — like thought-speak speech bubbles never having arrows, I love that. But it also might be that Grine is constantly getting handed an entire novel and told "make this a 200-page comic by, oh, next week" and sacrifices have to be made with regard to visual composition and background detail.

Anyway. Crayak. Sorry I got so off-topic there.

x x x x x

Crayak's shitty cat lapdog — Drode the wild card.

I was trying to make him look like something you'd want to throw a slipper at. My sister said she'd rather take a brick lol.

Well I guess having facial muscles and expressions would pass as "humanlike head" lol.

Btw can someone please enlighten me? Because I feel like the answer is somewhere in the books, but I've accidentally missed it. So my question is: what exactly is Drode's origins? Did Crayak created him (like Howlers) or did Drode one day just decided "Yeah, to serve malevolent red eyeball sounds cool, I'm in"; or something else?..

《Morphtober- PREY

Crayak is like... really hard to wrap my brain around because I think everyone and their mother pictures him as that big eyeball from Lord of the Rings which ... I don't care about

Hey Billy what was your favorite part of Animorphs?