#zekeyspaceylizard

inktober #19

todays theme was “scorched” which is the same as roasted so im not bothering taxing my brain over it

so instead i drew the cast for the first 1/3 or so of the Profiteer scripts ive been writing. im at about 36 of these at the moment. im still not sure what i want to do with them. a webcomic is a pretty huge endeavor, but at the same time its not like im up to much these days

anyway

from left to right

vahista, the little blue fellow. a sea monster musician with a gambling problem. hires zeke (the green reptile) to be his bodyguard. they become partners for a bit, doing odd jobs and small time crime to pay off their debts. as time goes on, vahista grows disgusted at zeke and the work they do. vanishes mysteriously later on.

thrist, the black gooey thing. she hails from a dimension where light does not exist. has a tendency to live inside of people. also has a tendency to slowly devour them. she doesnt remember who she used to be for much of the story. which is a good thing. because who she used to be is someone quite dangerous.

harla, the yellow one. a religious zealot and fanatic. she and zeke meet when she is exiled for burning heretics. they bond over a love for recreational substances. she later becomes a despot of her world. things seem pretty good until thrist’s people invade and begin to devour the populace. she is willing to do anything to save them. anything.

komkros, the grey thing in the back. his body is made of data. his people are living concepts, from a dimension where only thought exists. he quite enjoys hacking and stealing data to add to himself. he later becomes a space cop, working for kosiv, the red fellow on the right. they condemn harla’s world when a plague breaks out. they dont know its an invasion until its much too late.

zeke, the green main character of the story. from a slave to a mechanic to a soldier and finally winding up as a war profiteer, zeke has done a lot of questionable things in life. the last of a dying race, theres little he wont do to make a quick buck. he assembles a crew of folks as odd as he is, in the hopes they can get everything they ever wanted. sadly this leads to tragedy for a great many people.

beek, the little purple space crab, smiling, which she doesnt do often. she always had a knack for putting things together and taking them apart. but while trying to build an infinite energy source she accidentally creates something much more precious: a soul. now a parent to a being neither flesh or machine, she wants a life free of chop shops and gunsmithing. but life doesnt always work out the way you want it to.

kosiv, the red nasty looking fellow. an utter bastard. abusive. petty. arrogant. and zeke’s commanding officer and longtime nemesis. zeke gets the upper hand and kills him early on in the story. but his death causes quite a snowball effect as the system begins to unravel both politically and socially. because even a bastard can have very powerful friends.

Inktober 31: The Profiteer and The Fugitive

So for my last Inktober I made a very quick and very sloppy (the proportions are all wrong) doodle of Zeke and Turgid. Two characters out of a decent handful I’ve been developing in my head most of my life.

Zeke is where I get my online handle from. From a miserable slave to the leader of a notorious gang to a war profiteer, serving only to make as much riches from conflicts in the galaxy as he can. Zeke is often the antagonist in his own stories. His somewhat easygoing exterior is misleading, hiding the heart of a cruel and sadistic bastard of a creature. He lives like a nomad, hopping from system to system, selling deadly weapons and doomsday devices to any oppressed race desperate enough to give him loot for his wares. But he can be a bit of a softie when motivated properly.

Turgid, opposite, is part of a race of mineral-gathering peaceful crustacean aliens. She broke away from her colony ages ago, hoping to find something fresh and interesting to do with her life, landing a career as a successful keeper of the law. A job she really really loved. However, crossing paths with Zeke forces her to kill her commanding officer, leading to her becoming a fugitive. She becomes Zeke’s first crewmate in a very long time, the two forming a friendship due to having a mutual fear of each other. Loyal and talkative, she grows to enjoy the life of selling illegal weapons on the intergalactic black market. But her future lies elsewhere...

These two are the main characters of the first few big arcs of a story I’ve been putting together in my imagination since I was a young lad. Originally I had wanted them to be part of a film or cartoon series. But I’m 31 and no closer to working on TV or Movies than I was as a fetus. I’m going to attempt to make a webcomic of this idea sometime in the near future. I thought, since this is the last Inktober I’m ever going to do (ever.) I should make something personal and close to my heart.

For the last few months I’ve been writing the stories down in scripts. So far I’m 17 scripts in. Theres quite a few other characters who appear as well. Jikjik, a renegade and obsessed space cop. Tif, an unwilling shapeshifter and medical anomaly that comes into Zeke’s care. Zed, the maimed and genius long lost brother of Zeke. King Tippity, the hairy oaf who is the catalyst of the first story arc. The Cosmic Cretins, Zeke’s former partners, all of whom are no longer around due to mysterious reasons I’ll slowly hopefully reveal.

Chances of this becoming a webcomic are fairly slim. Out of all 31 inktober drawings I’m only satisfied with maybe 6 or 7 out of the lot. The rest are fairly mediocre run-of-the-mill doodles and depress me a fair amount. It’s definitely reminded me why I havent tried to execute Zeke’s story before. It’s the kind of thing I have to make sure is great the first time. If the first few pages of the webcomic dont come out to my liking I might just scrap it and write them as illustrated novels instead.

We will see! I’m trying to be optimistic about it!

So that’s the end of my inktober run. I hope this amused some people and will silence those who wonder why I don’t upload art often.

This is the music video Gerkinman and I made several years ago back during 2008/2009.

It was a simpler time back then. I had been working for Weebl for only a few months and was quite excited since it felt like my career was finally getting past the starting line (I was very naive back then). Then my buddy Gerkinman appears, known by his real life name Daniel Elliot, and known by the Ukatchu tribe of Tanzania as “He Who Kicks the Geese”. Where he got said title I do not know it is a story that he never tells.

At the time Gerkinman was living in Australia and was pretty much loathing it. Australia does not have much in the way in the animation or graphic design these days and he was doing work that greatly displeased him. I’m not sure exactly how he got into contact with the band known as The Basics.

I think it might have something to do with some people he knew from the newly-created aussie studio Rubber House. Regardless, he got familiar with the basics. Who are the Basics? A lovely band whose frontrunner you might know under the name Gotye. Yes THAT Gotye.

So you can imagine my confusion and excitement when Gerkinman came to me, covered in spears and goose down and wounds, informing me that we needed to collaborate. I had known Gerkinman for a good while before that. We had similar tastes in art and were both refugees from a formerly popular animation website. He’s a good friend whom I still chat with almost daily. At the moment he’s working on a show coming to Netflix in the near future.

Anyway, my memory is foggy on all that happened next but I know we ended up deciding to make a music video that was a tribute to giant japanese monster shows and films. Kaiju fighting on an island, with lots of destruction and slapstick silliness. We fiddled with concepts and influences and eventually settled on an art style that was sort of a mix between Joel Trussell, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and a dash of Kandinsky simplified into a very paper-doll sort of look.

Characters within the video are inspired from all sorts of things. The big robot is sort of a combo of an EVA from Evangelion and a ZAKU suit from Gundam. The band appear in the video dressed in superhero costumes that are sort of a mix of Kamen Rider uniforms and Ultraman and Jet Jaguar. And the monsters are just made up Kaiju. Big and silly and ridiculous.

Gerkinman storyboarded most of it and then we each animated a few scenes between the two of us, generally alternating. We both designed a lot of buildings for the backgrounds and shared them between the two of us. There was a definite color palette we stuck to and rarely strayed from. Oranges, reds, yellows, pastel green and deep dark blue colors for most of the backdrops with the kaiju in shot. The main kaiju was sky blue and brown so it would stick out amongst the buildings. And then the opposite for the mech. Since the mech was red we generally tried to keep backdrops full of colors that would keep it from blending in too much. Characters were usually shaded with thick black shadows but buildings were shaded with darker tones of their base for the most part.

And then we worked on it for a long time and it was finished! And the band played it behind them when they did shows and such, and Gerkinman even got to attend one of those shows. It’s still one of the biggest things I ever worked on and aired a few times on tv over in Australia on RageTV. It’s nice to have it on Vimeo now in HD quality with the most recent version of the song playing on it.