From the Drawings Unit
I'm currently building out the Robots book and one section is about these personal assistant bots that I've been putting in my comics. They're like floating Alexas, but they have their own AI and personalities. I came up with the concept way back in 2004 when I drew a short story called "Lucy Nova" about a space biologist and her side kick who documented everything they were discovering:
In the robots book I'm highlighting the assistant bot for this space witch character I keep coming back to:
I started thinking about where the idea for this witch came from and I remembered it has it's roots in some concepts I came up with over 20 years ago.
In 2002 a guy reached out to me about drawing his sci-fi Wizard of Oz story. I was too busy at the time to draw a full comic*, but I told him I would do the character designs. He didn't have a lot of money to pay me, but he ran a t-shirt printing company and said he could pay me in shirts. So I made a deal to do the art for 100+ shirts. I gave him a Missile Mouse design to print on them, and then I sold those on my website (via paypal) and made a nice profit.
Here's one of the designs I made for him:
I always loved this idea: jet pack monkeys and a leather clad witch with a rocket broom.
A few months later I did this design:
And that just kind of stayed in my head until about 7 years ago when I designed this witch with a magic-punk broom.
I redrew her for my Traveler's print I made for Inktober 2017:
The idea of combining technology with a witch festered and grew in my imagination and then a few years ago I made this little drawing:
I thought that maybe this could be a fun character to fold into my Red Shift Renegades universe.
A year later I did this drawing, developing the character further:
Then I revisited the character again in 2021 with this drawing for Inktober:
I'm not sure what her entire backstory is. I know she's well connected in the Red Shift underworld. Does she practice magic? Is she an interdimensional being like the Star Catcher? Or is her past more prosaic and she's thirsting for weird adventures?
Who knows!
-Jake
*The guy he ended up finding was a young, inexperienced Ryan Ottley who would go on to draw Invincible, Spider-Man, and Hulk!
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