#label buddy

I think I've pretty much covered all the vital Comic Shorts backstory, so these posts should start getting shorter unless I have a lot to say about a particular comic or drawing.

We're still in 2006! Still drawing comics in Flash, but Leko has progressed closer to his final form. In trying to distance his design from the BIONICLE version, I made his head a dark teal and gave it a weird gradient. At some point, I decided it was okay to keep the bright blue, and just make the rest of his body silver, gray and black.

And the little cutout above his eyes is gone. Strangely, though, I did notice that I actually kept that detail when I made updated chibi Flash models.

Probably because I just recolored the old version and changed the eye, but I definitely took it out at some point because I have animations and art of these designs where he doesn't have it. Just another interesting detail I noticed while looking through my old stuff.

So. 2006. December, 2006. Nintendo's Wii was released a mere few weeks ago, and news spread fast of folks wrecking their TV screens by accidentally flinging remotes at them.

Fortunately, this didn't happen to me or any of my friends. That I know of. But it was still a fun idea for a silly comic. And as a bonus Label Buddy doesn't even get hurt in this one!

I ALREADY REGRET STARTING THIS BLOG. I WAS UNPREPARED FOR THE CRINGE.

Okay. Just need to fight through it and talk about THIS thing.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only surviving comic featuring Leko as "Lekonua." Pretty much every single one of them was drawn in one school notebook or another, and I'm 90% sure they've long since been thrown away.

But even back then it was pretty rare for Leko to appear in hand-drawn form at all. I originally created him to be my author avatar for the sprite comics I used to make for BZPower. And he looked like this most of the time:

Yep.

In middle school I made some new IRL friends, and we started drawing comics including each other's characters. (Which were basically just cooler versions of ourselves.) Since Lekonua was really the only character I had ever used to represent myself, he migrated into the "Comic Shorts" universe to appear alongside Dragon Master the ninja and Label Buddy the generic faceless guy whose only real purpose is to be dumb and get hurt a lot.

A LOT of our older comics were just either complaining about how boring school was, or doing "lol so random" stuff. Also references. And jokes stolen from much funnier people than us.

Like the entire concept for THIS comic! I knew "plutonium from household products" was ripped off from SOMETHING, and I had to do a bit of searching to find what exactly it came from. (And this was made slightly more difficult because I slightly misremembered the line.)

It was from Weird Al's movie, UHF, which I must have very recently seen for the first time if I was making this overt a reference to it.

Anyway. "Dragon Master" had a fairly consistent drawing style where all the characters were simplified and had large eyes, and Lekonua needed to be simplified a bit further to fit that style. The end result of that was basically the current version of Leko who looked much less like a BIONICLE character, and more like...well...just some robot.

Eventually I decided it would be a good idea to make Leko his own unique thing and significantly reduce the likelihood of getting sued by LEGO. So I adopted the simplified design, made some small adjustments over time, and settled on the current official version of Leko The Robot Who Is Entirely Unaffiliated With The LEGO Company.

Or just...