#otake

To figure out their relative heights, it was the usual game of Measuring Stick Yusuke, i.e., relying on the fact that every single character at some point has stood next to Yusuke, or next to someone who has stood next to Yusuke. In this case:

Hokushin is a head taller than Yusuke.

Otake is about half a head taller than adult Koenma.

Adult Koenma is half a head taller than Yusuke.

Therefore, Otake is about half a head taller than Hokushin. Success!!***

This is assuming nobody changed in height between 700 years ago and now lmao

(*** EDIT: I reread this post and was like, wait, what I wrote doesn't make sense. Measuring stick logic outlined above actually indicates that Hokushin and Otake would be about the same height lol. My logic failed. However, I went back to doublecheck my notes and the manga panels and "Otake is about half a head taller than adult Koenma" is little more than guesswork because they spend most of the time crouched next to each other and leaning slightly forward, so he could be anywhere from the same height to even a head taller. Ehhhhhh close enough. Again, 700 years, who's counting.)

Reverse engineering character designs to different ages/periods is always a fun exercise. Aside from new clothes, one of the easiest and most obvious things to do is to change up their hair! Super easy for these two. Give Hokushin hair, and shave Otake’s mustache off and give him a closer-to-period hairstyle instead of his Western-style cut. Done! But of course, a challenge is that for most visual storytelling purposes, you still need the character to be quickly recognizable.

To me, the really distinguishing aspect of Hokushin and Otake is how Togashi renders their eyes. This is where I find it particularly interesting, because both of them have very fixed eye styles. I personally struggle a lot with making them more expressive without feeling like I’m going super off-model. I have a lot more flexibility with Hokushin now because I’ve drawn him about a bajillion times, and through North Bound I’ve stretched the comfort level of how I can depict him. This is only Otake’s second appearance in North Bound (though it feels like a lot more because it’s taking me a while to draw all these parts of a story), so it’s been more challenging. Page 7 in fight / flight part 1 was difficult in terms of making him look intense. You can see what happens if I tried too hard to convey intensity with his eyes by checking out the sketch of the page - it doesn’t look like him anymore. (Sometimes that can work though, for drama especially when conveying something going off the wall and pushing their limits or shocking others with an about-face.)

Working through their designs allowed me to reflect on the parallels in their design and nature. Hokushin and Otake are both envoys of sorts for extremely ancient and powerful non-human masters, and naturally bring a lot of visual gravitas to that role. Neither of them are the sort of people who’re here to just chill and hang out, and their visual appearance and presence need to convey that.

Hokushin I’ve talked about before. Togashi draws him with these really low eyebrows and flat, dark eyes that almost never shift. This makes him look very serious, to the point of glowering. But through the magic of characterization, context and other little facial details, he feels a lot “softer” - friendlier and more approachable. On the flipside, Otake has very thick bushy eyebrows and beady eyes. His eyebrows are definitely much more mobile than Hokushin’s in the manga, and the styling has the potential of coming off almost comedic, but we never get that impression from him unless Togashi is actually drawing him in a situation where we’re intended to laugh at him (e.g., his reactions to Yusuke pretending to turn into an evil demon). Instead, he feels really serious - much more rigid and inflexible than Hokushin.