For today’s non-comic pseudo-update, I thought I’d give everyone a little peek into the comic’s pre-history. Here’s a look at the initial sketch-on-a-napkin notebook concept art for the characters.
I wanted the characters in Badnix to represent recognizable “types” from video games, without being on-the-nose parodies. Rog fills the Goomba niche, of course, although his design draws more on the Troggles from Number Muncher. I stuck a leaf on the top of his head to signify that he came from the Wood World, which I eventually realized made him look entirely like a tomato.
Perry is probably a little tougher to figure out. I wanted to parody the Mario Bros. convention of stapling wings to standard enemies, as well as the general video game cliche of a “standard enemy” that comes in a variety of flavors. I settled on Foblins as the dominant race of the Badnix world, drawing on the Moblins from Zelda, goblins from Final Fantasy, imps from Chrono Trigger, and perhaps distantly on the Orcs from the early Warcraft games. As you can see above, it took a little more thought to settle on Perry’s exact design.
Since Rog is basically a head with feet, I had a lot of trouble at first figuring out how I’d stage conversations between him and larger characters. I briefly considered shrinking Perry down to “chibi”-proportions, or increasing the size of Rog’s legs/feet. Ultimately, it’s just something I’ve had to deal with, which is probably a good thing – it’s forced me to be creative about the “camera angles” I use in every panel, instead of falling back on that “TALKING HEADS IN 3/4 PERSPECTIVE OMG” shortcut a lot of cartoonists use.
These seem to be the earliest sketches of Mr. Fir and Arika. I’m not sure I had a specific point of reference in mind for Arika, although bugs and spiders are pretty ubiquitous enemies in video games. People have correctly identified Whispy Woods from Kirby as Mr. Fir’s inspiration, although it’s more an allusion to the idea of bosses just being a GIANT OBJECT consistent with whatever their level’s theme happened to be.
…and here’s the earliest version of Kevin! I guess he was a viking, or something? I hadn’t really figured out the connection between humans and the world of Badnix yet at this point. Also, for some reason I thought it was necessary to make him look as little like Mario as possible, an objective I seem to have given up on pretty early.
Welp, I hope that was at least a little interesting. Come back Monday for an actual, honest-to-god comic strip! I hope!
– CC
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