#leko

So hers can look like this

Well.

I guess that concludes this experiment.

I've wanted to draw Leko beating someone with his own head for a long time, and I'm so happy I finally found an opportunity to use that idea.

WHAT IF...

THERE WAS A COMIC SHORTS MOVIE...

AND THE STUDIO...

DIDN'T GIVE A SINGLE FUCK ABOUT ADAPTING IT?

"Leko Visits the AI Data Center"

I sure hope nobody is inspired to attempt this by my fun little animation project here.

Seriously, this is a bad idea and could cause a lot of serious problems if you get caught.

So don't.

The original was partially an experiment to see how little detail I could get away with by having the texture interpolation and CRT effects cover it up. I think it worked pretty well, but I had another idea for a quick animation that I didn't think "version 1" was quite right for.

So I remade the model and put actual work into the texture this time. Interestingly, the new model actually had a lower poly count than the original at first. But then I did that thing to make the eyes better and it ended up surpassing the original by exactly TWO triangles.

It's also rigged slightly differently. I wasn't sure I'd be able to "hard" rig some parts and "soft" rig others on the same skeleton in Blender, but apparently I can! So his hands and waist are flexible while all the other parts are rigid.

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!

"Label Buddy Dies Again"

"Leko Plays Final Fantasy VII"

Woah! A two-fer! If the dates on these files are to be believed, I drew these two comics in Flash less than a week apart. And since they're in the same style, I might as well post them together and save a little space in the archive.

Around this time I was really trying to get into the actual *animation* part of Flash animation. I learned how a lot of my favorite animators made their cartoons by just watching them and seeing how they basically drew characters and split them into parts to make animation models. So I did that with our Comic Shorts characters with the intention of making many animated adventures with them.

And that did not happen with these version of the characters. But I did make a few comics with the models. And by "a few" I mean exactly these two.

Leko's design was still in a transitional period, which is why he still has that cutout above his still circular eyes, and is a little more bulky and squat. He still had a lot of Matoran in him.

"What if Label Buddy got hurt a lot?" Was pretty much our longest running "joke," and we definitely never had any real plans for a "canon" for these guys early on. Buddy being cloned every time he is violently killed was never intended to be a definitive explanation for why he keeps coming back.

Oh yeah! This is also one of the ONLY times I ever used one of our main villains! In one of Dragon Master's older comics, Buddy chokes on a speck of dirt, but he coughs it up before he can die. Speck of Dirt curses his failure and became a semi-regular villain.

There was also the creatively named Villain, an evil ninja with a demon arm. Dark Buddy, Label Buddy's counterpart from the Shadow World (where everyone has opposite traits, so DB is an eloquent evil genius.) And Shadowy Figure, a...shadowy figure with like darkness powers or something?

ALSO ALSO, I think this is the first appearance of the "white walls and red floor" ambiguous house setting I would go on to frequently use. I just realized that while I was writing this.

SO LET'S TALK ABOUT FINAL FANTASY NOW.

I did not grow up with this series. I knew almost nothing about it except that there was a guy with a really big sword, and another guy with a really long sword. And I think I knew the long sword guy's name was Sephiroth (and *maybe* that he was the bad guy?) I remember watching "The Spirits Within" and being disappointed that there wasn't any magic or sword fighting in it, even though I do love a good sci-fi story and the animation *was* absolutely mind blowing.

Dragon Master, however, was SUPER into it. We watched the recently released Advent Children movie together, and I had 100% no idea what was even happening, but it was still awesome. At some point not long after that DM lent me their copy of FF7, which resulted in this comic loosely based on my experience. I *probably* didn't actually stay up until 4 AM playing it, but for all I know I might have.(Definitely didn't hallucinate and attack anyone with an 8-foot katana, though.)