#037 College Girl

So there’s a bit of a story for this page. Particularly regarding the guy on the left in panel 2.

When we ran our IndieGoGo to raise funds for Albuquerque Comic Expo this last June, my aunt contributed on one of the higher levels. She told me that she didn’t expect a perk on that one, but if I felt like trying it, to draw my cousin Kirby as a character in the comic.

This is my awesome cousin Kirby.

He’s already had a few friends draw him as a comic book character, so my aunt wanted to expand on that collection.

Cool, I thought. This’ll be great! I have party scenes planned later, I’m sure I can work him in.

And then I got to drawing this page.

Clearly the most striking feature for Kirby, character-design-wise, is his beard and that great, wooshy, classically Leo hair of his. Hm. Native with a beard, I thought to myself. Well, why not? There haven’t been any so far, but I’ll go ahead and draw that!

I got to the chin, where these island natives wear their language tattoo. The language tattoo is very, very important to them, it lets strangers know when they meet you that you actually speak their language, and could thus be the difference between a friendly encounter and one that is treated with suspicion. If somebody had a beard covering their chin in this world, everyone would flip out and might even think that the guy couldn’t talk at all! I tried to modify the beard to accommodate the tattoo, and while it would totally work with his real life beard, getting it to translate onto the paper was not at all working.

Then came the hair. Almost all the natives have crazy hair over here, so I had to take that nice, wooshy style he has going and spike it all backward in as swave a way as a man possibly could when his styling product is very likely mud.

And now he looks nothing like my cousin.

I did, however, use one of Kirby’s real life tattoos for the family markings on his cheeks. Kirby’s got the Zia Sun on his arm, so I took the four lines from it as inspiration.

It still is a fail attempt.

Which means that this may become a running thing in which I try to work my cousin into the comic as a background NPC every time we encounter a new group of people.

Let the games begin.