I’m considering reposting the old webcomic on a page-per-day basis to generate interest in the run up to the release of the first book. Perhaps it could even be a sort of “Special Edition” with the color restored to the early monochrome pages and other improvements (I could amend Sylvia’s short hair in the first arc, for starters). I’ve never done it up until now because I’ve been ashamed of those early rough pages, and half the story has been retconned out of the current StarStrikers timeline anyway, but if ever there was a time when I’d be more inclined to do it, it’d be now, while I’m on this whole “unapologetic” kick. On the other hand, if it’s going to take up a lot of time I could be using to work on new material I’d rather not bother. Hmm…

You know those clip show episodes on TV where characters reminisce about previous events? This model sheet is a little like those, in so far as there’s a little reuse of old material here, it isn’t all strictly new stuff. Wait! Hear me out…

Like Sylvia, Corinne’s model was designed to be hot-swappable. I knew that down the road I’d be creating many more new outfits for the girls, and although it meant a bit more work at the time, I knew it’d pay off down the road. (Incidentally, I considered doing the same thing for Darryl, but he’s been wearing more or less the same thing since around 2002, so that was quickly abandoned.)

All of this is great in theory, but in practice I still found myself redrawing most of Corinne for this design - I’d say about 20% of her is carried over, mostly in the head, and even then I’ve redrawn a lot of it: this whole super-cutesy blushing thing she’s got going on is unique to this model. Who or what she is blushing at, I have no idea. She definitely ends up red-faced at her father’s party while wearing this, but only with embarrassment after what happens with the ice sculpture… and then again moments later after running into Sylvia’s… well, let’s just say there’s never a dull moment in StarStrikers. I’m trying to give you a little context here without spoiling the first book for you.

Carlton is Corinne’s father, and some of you may remember him from his appearances in the StarStrikers webcomic, where he had the unlucky distinction of being, I believe, the only regular character to never make it into the color strips - his initial appearances were all during the period where it was presented in B&W for no good reason. By the time we got back to Morrigan Manor I was in my experimentation phase of trying anything to up my workrate, so the color window passed him by completely. Still, he had enough page time to allow me plenty of practice in refining his design.

For some reason I wanted to retrace my steps with Carlton, and so I went and dug up my old sketchbook from 2000-03, which was a real trip down memory lane as it contains some of the oldest StarStrikers material around. Since Carlton 2003 only took up one half of the page, I drew his new design on the other side, and so it became a sort of “before and after” thing. None of this seemed problematic at the time. It wasn’t until much, much later, when I’d redrawn and colored him digitally and positioned him next to Corinne that I saw the problem. He wasn’t proportioned like a modern StarStrikers character, but more like something I would have drawn five years ago. His head was tiny and he had this incredibly lanky frame. So it was back to the drawing board. I pulled his line art apart and resized all the components to bring him in line with the other characters. These drastic alterations meant I had to color him again from scratch, but the second attempt is much better than the first so… c’est la vie.

Danny Blight is Corinne’s boyfriend as of the start of StarStrikers: First Strike!. He’s a character that’s really snowballed over time from being an unseen plot device who only existed to break Corinne’s heart, to being a notable character who appeared at the beginning of the book and did the same thing, to eventually becoming a notable figure within the Strikerverse in his own right. He seems to share his pose with Freddy from the Black Mondays, but then all my teenage boys seem to be surly, back-talking rebels so perhaps that’s understandable. Also, after years of complaining about what possessed me to put Corinne in a denim jacket in the webcomic, it appears that she’s lent it to Danny. It’s like the cat that came back, it just won’t go away!

Beatrice is the Morrigan family’s head maid/cleaner. She seems to really have it in for Corinne for no reason, or perhaps for reasons that will become clear down the road. In any event, she’s been undermining our poor C-Jo’s confidence and self-worth for many years with her backhanded compliments and general insincerity. For this reason I’ve been theorizing lately that she may actually be a far greater threat to Corinne than Kitty, Serenade or the Darkspecters, that she’s sort of an enemy within. But nah, she’s just some mouthy old windbag. There’s something about her design that I find ghoulish and unnerving, to the point where she was difficult to finish coloring. I don’t know, maybe I’ve been working too many late nights recently, of which this is one. On an unrelated note, her squint was unintentional but I left it in because it just made her appear even more smug.

Chancellor Xa was supposed to be a secret character, a surprise of sorts, but since he’ll be appearing in the prequel short story leading up to First Strike!, I figure you may as well catch a first glimpse of him here. Xa was Lo’s (Lowenstein’s) employer and mentor on his home planet, he’s very much the elder statesman type. Initially I was going to draw him from the pencil stage up, then I realized that I already have stock vector components I use in the construction of Lowenstein, plus all the Scuttlebugs are largely similar in appearance, so he became a reworking of Lo’s design.

So, so many retools, and I still have one more outfit for Corinne and two for Sylvia that I need to produce. I may even end up adapting the old art of Corinne’s Porsche and the team truck as a time-saving measure, just so I can finally get around to starting on the actual art for the book. In the words of Whitney Houston, I learned from the best… I learned from you. And by “you”, I mean Hasbro. :p

You wait so long for this day and when it comes… you don’t know what to say. I thought StarStrikers: First Strike! was complete last spring, and had even gone so far as to start putting together PDF layouts in readiness for publication. It quickly became apparent, however, that years of rewrites had taken their toll on the manuscript. There were continuity problems, plot holes, even grammatical issues and typos here and there that I hadn’t picked up on. The book had potential and yet also problems, perhaps in equal measure. Before very long it became apparent that this story could be much more than it was.

It took the better part of the summer and an almost completely new ending, but eventually the rewrite was complete. The new StarStrikers: First Strike! was a much more well-rounded beast than the one I almost inflicted upon the world last spring. It felt more streamlined, more straightforward, more engaging. And yet it wasn’t a short book, if anything it had grown longer: 85,000 words, more than twice the recommended length for a Young Adult novel, and that’s still not counting the bonus material I keep talking about throwing in the back. It’s epic, dudes. Well, some of you have been waiting the best part of eight years for this book to finally get published, so at least there’s plenty of it!

Of course having ensured I had a second opinion there was no harm in also getting a third, so I sent the summer revision to my agent, who had one of his readers critique it. I got their notes back last week and to be perfectly honest I was a little rattled by it. As a writer, though, I feel any time people pick apart your work, no matter how complimentary they are, you’re always going to focus on the negative. And yes, the main talking points seemed to be that the concept of the book (aliens, robots… alien robots, even!) would only appeal to the younger set, and yet it was too long for those readers. Well, StarStrikers was always intended for a teenage audience, so that didn’t worry me. For a while last week I was actually considering splitting First Strike! into two books, but it’d be an additional expense both for me as the publisher and you as the reader. It seems to me that our culture is expanding laterally: on the one hand we have websites like YouTube and Twitter which break everything down into tiny fragments, and on the other we have books that run for hundreds of pages and films that last for several hours. StarStrikers: First Strike! definitely falls into the latter category and I’ve made my peace with that. There was still room for a tiny bit more tweaking, though, to make sure it was just right.

To that end, I compiled a checklist of seventeen final changes to make to the manuscript, ranging from typos to more significant plot points. Having made those amendments, what we have now is the final, final, final version of the book. So hopefully I’ll never have to go back and start chopping and changing this manuscript again – at least unless some mainstream publisher ever gets their mitts on it.

You can imagine that I’m actually quite happy right now; I feel like after all these months of having to reconstruct this novel that we’re finally moving forward again. As it stands I reckon I need another one or two model sheets, three tops, then I can move forward with the art for the book itself. Yay!

After the initial batch of character designs, and a rather off-beat bunch of logo and package concepts, we now arrive at the weapons for each of the StarStrikers. Here’s a very brief rundown:

Sylvia’s sword was originally dubbed the ‘Scuttleshift Implemented Electricity Displacement Sabre’. Sylvia immediately renamed it ‘Ellie’. We first caught a glimpse of Ellie back in August in the Darryl & Sylvia pin-up, but this gives you a better idea of how it’s supposed to look end-to-end, and in color of course.

Corinne’s gun is a custom Beretta 92 (of sorts) that was actually manufactured by Lowenstein. It can fire traditional ammunition via a standard magazine as seen here, but can also use a special mag to unleash powerful blasts of energy. I’ve accumulated a lot of reference material over the years for Corinne’s gun, which helped when I had to painstakingly create this as a vector piece in Illustrator. At first I really wasn’t sure about having the StarStrikers emblem on the grip, but now I’ve come to love the dichotomy of this dangerous weapon having a cutesy smiley face on it!

The Lowenstaff was an aborted design that I’d filed away in my ‘old junk’ folder. I had planned to start over and try something completely different, but instead decided to resurrect it and try to fix it up a little. I added the binary design on the main body, plus a small StarStrikers emblem and reworked the points on either side. I still feel it’s a little plain, but then perhaps a more ostentatious weapon wouldn’t suit Lowenstein. Since the Lowenstaff has three modes, I’ve tried to demonstrate them all here. In its first iteration it’s simply a staff - this is the defensive mode. Intermediate mode is a lance, with a spike on one side. Finally, offensive mode is a spear and the weapon becomes double-edged.

From the early days of StarStrikers until very recently Darryl carried a normal, very modern-looking switchblade knife. This design is a little more traditional but at the same time is more of a fantasy weapon: the blade is a conduit for Darryl’s psychic energy (much like Ellie is for the electricity from Sylvia’s Carnage Gloves). The line-art and coloring for this was all done in a couple of hours, which makes a nice change. ^_^

I still have a few more character and vehicle illustrations to get down, and then I’m just gonna get right down to it and start work on the illustrations for the first book.

EDIT (02/12/2008): Amended the Lowenstaff slightly. I felt it was still a little dull so I changed the body of the staff from black to red.

I’ve spent the weekend tinkering with Wordpress, having decided that the migration I had planned to Drupal would be more trouble than it’d be worth. My main objective for version 4.5 (it won’t quite merit a full numeric increase after all) is to make the site much brighter, more engaging, and overall more fun. The current site design was only ever intended as an intermediate step; I had no idea it’d hang around for almost two years.

We’re still a little way away from StarStrikers: First Strike! being published, but it’s very important to me that the upgraded site is online before then in order to generate interest. It’s codenamed “teenwork”, a nod to the fact that the StarStrikers are nominally teenagers… okay, Sylvia isn’t and Lo is at least a century old in human years. He’s a teenager in Scuttlebug terms, but I digress. It’s very much designed with the StarStrikers as a team in mind. The new site will retain all the current content but it’ll hopefully be a lot more engaging for the 13-16 age group that the books are intended for. Teenagers + teamwork = Teenwork, see? I think it’ll be much more in keeping with what I’ve dubbed the “sneakers and bubblegum” vibe of the novels.

But enough marketing speak - what can you expect to see in v4.5? Lots more profiles, for starters. I want every significant character in the book to have their own bio and some kind of visual representation on the site. That’ll also cover the vehicles and weapons used by the team, by the way. I expect there’ll be some revisiting of old ideas: I’ve been bandying around the possibility of posting monthly short stories again, much like I did back in 2002. First there’ll be a prequel story which leads into StarStrikers: First Strike!, and then I’m thinking about doing a series of monthly short tales which would bridge the gap between books #1 and #2; sort of a StarStrikers Rising version 2.0. In any event, expect more downloadable content, more interactivity(?) and definitely a much busier site as soon as First Strike heads into print. No more waiting 3-4 weeks between blog posts!

It feels good to see a project such as the website upgrade come together very quickly and satisfyingly, given that piecing together everything I require for the publication of the novel has been such a frustrating experience. Right now I’m just trying to push through all the different areas of this franchise, in print, online and everything in between. I hope that if nothing else a renewed starstrikers.com will go some way towards appeasing those of you who’ve been so patient with me over the years while I’ve been struggling to get First Strike! into print.

This model sheet rounds up some of the characters introduced in the second portion of StarStrikers: First Strike!, frequently referred to as “The Darryl Arc”. In some ways this has been the most challenging of all the model sheets so far, because I had to draw these guys for reference… and I didn’t want to! I guess you could say I had cold feet. There are a few allusions in the book towards Will and Lars’s appearances, so I at least had something to work with there, but I had next to nothing for the other two, for reasons I’ll go into in a moment.

For the uninitiated - which now that I think about it, is just about everyone, since book 1 is still vaporware - Will Rockwell is Darryl’s mentor and something of a surrogate father figure. Before I could start drawing him I had to acquire a lot of reference material, but unusually, it wasn’t a person from which I was drawing inspiration. I decided that he would effectively be like a big (mostly) shaven bear, with huge paw-like hands and feet. His proportions, the slope of his shoulders, the shape of his head, even the tufts of hair above his temples are all designed to convey this. He marks a further expansion in my design philosophy: up until now my focus has always been on maintaining solid human anatomy with my characters, since they had always drawn so much scorn when I was starting out. I think by this point I’ve proven that I have some idea what I’m doing, and so where appropriate I’m making some of the supporting cast for StarStrikers a little more quirky and interesting. In a way, I’m bringing the cartooning element back into my art a little more.

I really didn’t know about Will’s design at first. He’s one of those characters that seemed to lack something at the lineart stage, but really came to life during coloring. It probably also took a little time for me to come around to the unconventional aspects of his anatomy, but now I’ve warmed to him. FUN FACT: Will is the second-tallest character in StarStrikers; Sylvia is 1/10 of a head taller. ^_^

Lars is the leader of the Black Mondays, a gang that terrorizes a wealthy district of Los Angeles. His design was very loosely inspired by Kiefer Sutherland’s character in The Lost Boys, though his description in the book helped me more. Mostly it was a case of filling in the blanks. Note that the lighting for the gang is different to that used for Will and the other characters so far; I figure they usually appear under cover of darkness anyway, so I colored them in keeping with this.

Dwayne is the closest thing Lars has to a right hand man, but as such he never really gets the chance to define himself in the novel. About as much as we knew about his appearance was that he was slightly shorter than Lars and sported sunglasses. This meant I didn’t have much to work with, but I decided to turn it around and view it as a lack of limitations, as a blank slate, as free reign to do as I pleased as long as the final design fit the character. Somehow I ended up with this almost androgynous looking fellow. This design was a big gamble, but one that I feel paid off. He may be my favourite of this bunch.

During the rewrite process it was brought to my attention that Darryl’s arc is in some ways similar to the idea of the extended Foot Clan in the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. As it happens I just recently went back and re-watched the film, and so I decided that Freddy’s design would be a little homage to the character of Danny, one of the kids who falls in with the Foot Clan in said film. Freddy already had the headphones, so I also gave him a Danny-esque shirt (replacing “SID” with “BPM”, to bring things a little more up-to-date). He’s not quite as threatening as the others, I’d say he’s more vacant than anything.

Though not as blatantly as Will, there’s a little animalistic influence in the Black Mondays too. They were patterned after the four wise monkeys: Dwayne has the sunglasses (see no evil), Freddy has the headphones (hear no evil), Darryl has a somewhat oversized mouth (speak no evil), and Lars is just all-round bad news (do no evil). More often than not “do no evil” is omitted, but yes, sometimes there’s a fourth. All the members of the gang, including Darryl have slightly larger-than-normal ears in keeping with this design philosophy. Like Vigo, they have been baaad monkeys! ^_~

I’m actually quite happy with all of these guys now. They took much longer than they should have, especially considering that only one of them gets any page time beyond the second arc. But it’s fun to see these characters, who have all been part of the Strikerverse in some fashion since the early days, in illustrated form.

NEXT: I’m gonna diverge from model sheets briefly to finalize designs for logos, weapons and other items. Doesn’t sound too thrilling but I think some of these designs will be fun.

To prove the point that even I don’t get everything right first time (well, I guess the multiple rewrites of the first novel will attest to that), above is a test-run for a StarStrikers emblem T-shirt I had printed up via Spreadshirt. It would have been pretty terrific if it wasn’t for the fact that the white outline around the image completely screwed up the small copyright type and website URL. As a result it looks like Lowenstein has some kind of weird disclaimer of intellectual property goatee. I had no way of knowing that this was going to happen, the shirt certainly didn’t look like that when I uploaded the image. Oh well. I’ll try again.

EDIT: Spreadshirt’s website apparently won’t let me print my own image onto a colored T-shirt anymore, so I’ve run off another test shirt through Printfection instead, which looks promising. We should find out within about two weeks.

Last year I posted model sheets for all four of the StarStrikers: Corinne, Lowenstein, Sylvia and Darryl, as well as all four members of the team side-by-side. Of course heroes are only compelling if they have worthy adversaries, so here’s the new design for Kitty and a few of her more noteable co-workers from Serenade Corporation. You’ll note that these model sheets are modern, better re-imaginings of the StarStrikers and Victory 5 sheets from 2002, but the less said about those the better.

Before I go into each design, let me just say that I’m fairly frustrated at how long it’s taken me to finish this mini-project. I did the pencilling two weeks ago and wanted to get all of the inking/colouring done pretty quickly, but it ended up taking more than a week. I really need to pick up the pace, because although I’m happy with the quality of my work, the speed and volume of my art output is pitiful - I’m drawing non-stop but never make a whole lot of progress. It’s an issue that curtailed the effectiveness of the StarStrikers comic throughout its run, and although it’s not quite as much of a pressing issue now, it still irks me.

So, to Kitty. On my Twitter page I made a cryptic comment, “think YSL!”, in relation to her redesign. The YSL in question was Yves Saint Laurent. When he died a few months ago there was a lot of discussion about the suits he designed for women; you could say he pioneered the concept of “power dressing”. Wide shoulders, angular cuts, a very bold and masculine look. These were outfits designed for women who would play hardball in the boardroom just as well, if not better, than their male counterparts. You might say they were suits of armour, that allowed those women to cross a line that up until that point in history they had not been able to surpass. Or to put it another way, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. All of which was fine throughout the latter half of the seventies and most of the eighties, but eventually women got tired of looking like men. They decided they would start dressing like women again and threw away their shoulder pads.

Kitty, on the other hand, didn’t get the memo. She’s an anachnronism, a relic from a bygone age. There was a time when she was a rising star within Serenade Corporation, but those days are far behind her now. Her career was already floundering before she was lumbered with the task of capturing Lowenstein, and without giving away too much of the storyline from the first novel, things only get worse for her from that point on. She’s a broken woman, a wounded, carnivourous animal, and actually not quite the simple pantomime villainess she appears to be at the beginning of book one. But enough of the character study.

Once I’d gathered up my YSL references it was time to go to work. The biggest challenge was abandoning my preconceived notions about how to draw a suit and really look closely at what was noteable about my source material. I had some misgivings about this design at first because it’s so… wide. It felt wrong, and to some extent it still does. That’s really just the way that a suit like this is meant to look. The shoulders are wide of course, but the trouser legs in my reference photos were just insane, and I actually had to reign them in for Kitty quite a lot. It actually works for her, I feel. She has presence, and unlike 2002 Kitty, she’s balanced. I’ve long thought that StarStrikers felt a little like an “action figure” universe, by which I mean everything is very shiny and brightly coloured, but Kitty actually sort of looks like an action figure, in so far as she appears as if she was designed to have good balance and not topple over.

You’ll also notice that the waistband of Kitty’s trousers is very high. This again is somewhat derived from the reference material, but I also wanted to keep her legs looking very long to create the illusion of height. Kitty is only 0.2 heads taller than her arch nemesis, Corinne, and considerably shorter than Sylvia, the tallest character. However she still needs to look intimidating when standing next to Corinne or her subordinates. I sorta feel like I keep having to make excuses for the amount of real estate Kitty takes up, but it’s all been given a lot of careful consideration and I’m sure eventually we’ll all get used to it!

Azureus and Azriel were troublesome characters for me back in early 2002 when they were developed. I think a lot of that stemmed from the fact that at the time I still hadn’t had enough practice when it came to male characters. The other major stumbling point was that any outfit I put them in just looked… horrible. The twins were effectively mothballed during the webcomic era, but later when I found myself working in IT and surrounded by computer nerds I suddenly found I had a lot of inspiration to draw upon. In the end however, the best inspiration turned out to be very close to home. I mentioned recently that I enjoyed drawing Corinne because I felt that her character was something of a Mary Sue, and I guess the twins are really something of a visual Mary Sue. They’re not just palette swaps of each other, they’re also a palette swap of me on any given Casual Friday; I just happen to have red hair instead of blue. It seems apt since Azureus and Azriel are heavily inspired by the way I interact with the eldest of my three younger brothers, and the fact that we can can spend hours talking about video games and related tech talk, conversing in some sort of bizarre subset of the English language (in our case, mostly made up of Simpsons quotes) to the utter bafflement of onlookers.

In case you didn’t already guess, Azureus is the elder twin and a little bit more of a straight arrow. Azriel is younger, much more enthusiastic but also considerably more naive. Some fun trivia: in a convention borrowed from Sylvia, whose fringe parts into a double-S on either side, Azureus and Azriel both have a centre parting which forms a letter “A”.

Unlike the other characters I didn’t feel there’s was much wrong with the outfit May (or as she was then known, Kelly) sported in 2002, it was the drawing itself that was fundamentally… well, lame. So instead of re-inventing the wheel, May was more of an update. Her new circular glasses allow her to be more expressive without her frames getting in the way, and the colours of her clothing are more co-ordinated now. She’s a very fun character to draw, not just because she’s cute but also because her body type is so different to the other girls: Corinne’s a little bit waifish, Kitty a previously alluded to is squared-off and not particularly feminine, and Sylvia… well, she’s Sylvia. I think by the time I’m done with these character designs StarStrikers will have a pretty diverse range of male and female body types.

So to summarise; Kitty is growing on me, Azureus I feel is decent, Azriel is better, and May is perhaps my favourite of the four. Hey, I’m a sucker for kawaii characters, sue me. I don’t even care that she’s a dimwit.

EDIT: 21/09/08: Amended Kitty’s design slightly following feedback; her skull is a good 25% larger now relative to her hair. Her crotch has also been lowered and loosened somewhat.