Red Souls, Black Marigolds

Character design for Erik has been finalized.  At least on the mask.  Cool thing about a guy who wears a mask is he can wear many different masks… so if I don’t care for the current mask down the road… no big deal if he changes it up.

The hardest part is the decision of color.  In Leroux, it was black (when not wearing the nose/mustache thing whatever….) but in nearly every other version it’s white.  White is easier to see, to shade… we’ll have to see about coloring my mask.

We’re not talking about the Guy Fawkes/clownish looking masks, either.  Those may be done as gags for the comic.  Maybe in a “Side stories” that are not exactly related to the storyline. 

Shocking.  I’m still working.

Lack of scanner means lack of pages.  Yet.  Christmas is soon, however, and I pray to have one to start getting the pages up.  I never realized how hard it is to design a character who wears a mask and debating whether he wears a full mask or the 3/4ths mask (I’m aiming for the 3/4ths mask simply because it’s easier to draw expressions.. though expressions on Erik will be insanely difficult to draw anyway!)

I must add… the character Reiko… I love her nose.  Slightly upturned at the tip.  Just too cute to me.

Tonight I may experiment with adding watercolors instead of an ink wash to backgrounds (because ink washes are difficult to use and water color pencils take some of the difficulties away).  To add a depth to the backgrounds.  And because the Prologue is set at night and… well… it’s suppose to be dark.

So, as of 4:05 pm today (five minutes ago), I finished Page 4 of the webcomic.  Inking everything by hand is time consuming but rewarding to me in a way that I can’t explain.  I have an art tablet and I love it.  But I seem to lose something…  I honestly draw paper straight on paper.  I’m not sure why precisely.  The lines are cleaner, crisper, more uniform on the compupu, there’s hundreds of benefits for drawing the comic on the compupu.. 

But I’m stubborn, Hamlet.

This comic will admittedly be jumping into a much larger story that readers won’t see the entirety of, at least not immediately.  Or not with this angle of the story.  I’ll keep in mind that parts will have to be explained or explain them in comments beneath the pages so readers will perhaps understand what’s going on or why a character is as upset as they are…

While stalking certain forums while doing research on people’s take on poor Erik (various aspects of personality, history, what seems to be more popular beliefs or what would be more ‘true’ to the original story), one complaint about popular phanfiction of Erik is the lack of development of other characters.  This is not always necessarily true.  I want to develop characters  that people will either love or hate.  Don’t you love to hate characters that just keep showing up?  Or are so conflicted you can’t help but hate/love?  I would love to do that.

No worries.  Erik is not Mr. Perfect Romantic mushy mushy.  I want to keep the unpredictable aspect of him, the quirks of the personality.  The danger to those that dare to draw close. 

This is where the beginnings will… well, begin.  Here is the space created for the work-in-progress webcomic, Red Souls Black Marigolds.

To be brief, one of th main characters is based off Gaston Leroux’s Opera Ghost, Erik.  I had the question one day while re-reading the book and having previously read one of my many Angel Dictionaries (as I have an intense interest in angels.  Not those fluffy Cupid-like Cherubs that shoot arrows BA-BUMHUG):  “What if Erik was an angel?  What if he really was The Angel of Music?”

It’s Phandom, my twisted little take on what happened to the mysterious genius who lived beneath the Opera House in Paris, France and claimed he gave himself the name ‘Erik’.  He was also a liar.  Any reader of the original novel would know this. 

The other characters are of my own devising and is but a smaller part of a larger story.  I thought it be more interesting to focus on a set of characters and their story instead of everyone elses.

Everyone loves murdering, out-of-his-mind geniuses that live in the self-proclaimed Holiest of Thou realms, right?

Right.

The Neeko signing off.