A Brief History of Hud

So, um… Monday’s comic. Yeah. That did happen. (No, it wasn’t a decoy this time.)

Drawing so much of Hud recently, I started thinking a little about his origins. Hud’s pretty unique in the cast in that he’s based pretty heavily on a character design that existed quite a while before Badnix – specifically, a boss character in an aborted RPG game I was working on as a teenager.

There was going to be a quest in the game involving a town held captive by a powerful, reaper-like Lich, who was exacting bizarre tributes of yarn and tuna fish from the townsfolk. When your party confronted the Lich, you would knock the hood from his head and reveal that an ordinary cat had somehow set up camp inside of his skull and was working him like a puppet.

Years later, when I was splicing together elements from annoying sidekick characters to come up with Hud’s design, I tried blending a little of Tails the fox with Kazooie – and I arrived back at this idea of a tiny orange cat, peering over the shoulder of this giant bruiser, quietly pulling the strings.

My “art style” (if I had one) used to be a lot more sharp and geometric, which is probably reflected in the way he’s structured. The one new element I added for Badnix was the pinched, sloping eyes. It’s subtle, but I think it added kind of a ghoulish quality to Hud even when he was at his most innocuous.

Hud’s definitely been one of my favorite characters to work with, and rest assured that there is a LOT left to find out about him. Regardless of his current fate, he’s going to cast a long shadow on the comics to come.

-CC