"The Empty Quarter" History

Having just finished the first installment of Redtooth, I'm going to try and get installment 7 of The Empty Quarter started. This will be the final installment of TEQ, and after that I'll just have more Redtooth to work on.

For those of my faithful readers who don't know (and I know there are thousands of you readers out there), The Empty Quarter began as a four-page comic book assignment for my sequential art class, ARTS 275: Comic Book Illustration. In it I used a group of characters I had already conceived for a story of my own, titled Longshots.

Longshots is an expansive story about a crew of four misfits who prowl the galaxy, looking for odd jobs and generally getting into and out of trouble. There is Captain Andrew Logan, a former star-pilot; Second Mate and Engineer Beth Kasty, originally a mercenary fighting other aliens' wars; Communications Officer and Security Officer Ishmael Kuffing, whose past remains a bit of a mystery; and Botswain's Mate Eric Mudrow, a disgraced former Captain in the Space Navy. The first three all fought together (on one side or the other), and were already part of a successful shipping business with their starship, the Widowmaker, by the time Eric Mudrow came along. The story really begins with Eric's arrival, which sets off a whole chain of events that eventually involves them in a struggle to save the universe.

Longshots really began back in high school, although the themes and ideas had been kicking around in my head for nigh unto five years previous. I'd always had a bit of an outer space fetish (along with dinosaurs, bugs, and explosions), but what differentiated me from every other boy on planet earth was the fact that I could draw them, and thus I never outgrew them. In middle school I conceived an idea for a spacefaring ne'er-do-well and his cigar-smoking robot, and even got a few comic pages out of it; but my lack of control of the medium, together with the fact that I was heavily influenced by Calvin and Hobbes' "Spaceman Spiff" at the time, caused me to lose heart about halfway through. At any rate, I managed to get a good action arc out of it, even if it was utterly deranged.

Then ninth grade came. For reasons utterly lost to me now, I began drawing comic book scenes; I think I was influenced by the many who said, "Dude, you should make a comic book!" Which of course meant that I had to. The resulted was a behemoth called, Matt Darkk and the Home Alien Control: A Different Power.

Cover Page: Matt Darkk
of the Home Alien Control.

It was absolutely the most ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and inconsistent bit of sequential art ever produced. In the end, it totaled 121 printer pages, many of which had writing on the other side; it was drawn in Sharpie markers and Micron pens; the panels are off, the dialogue is stilted, the pacing is bad, the editing is nonexistant, and some scenes are obviously cobbled in between scenes. On the whole, it was a mess.

It was also an unmitigated triumph. What follows are some key scenes from the story:

Page 57, showing the gangster Rana and his freakish goon, Chinnegan.

Page 67: a Corrakim warbot.

Page 79: a Corrakim attacks; general mayhem ensues.

Page 93: a fight between two Corrakim.

Admittedly, these are some of the best images; but I still think it was a helluva thing (that I never want to do again). The whole operation took me three years. It was the first time I'd ever done a whole story in images.

Meanwhile, all during the production of Matt Darkk, I kept myself sane by coming up with other ideas. Here's a doodle I came up with that really marks the genesis of Longshots:

Sketch 1: divers and various spaceships; also, a star-pilot.

Believe it or not, that starpilot in the middle there is the very first image of Captain Andrew Logan - or at least his soon-to-be-named prototype.

From this one sketch evolved a vague story about a starfighter pilot and his squadron-mates. As it evolved, I began to think up adversaries for them to fight, as well as different incarnations of my main hero:

Sketch 2: showing a mechanical-armed pilot,
a pompadour-coiffed, gun-brandishing hotshot,
and divers and various villains.

Sketch 3: possible commanders.

Up till this point, I wasn't sure if I wanted it to be a comic book at all - I was still feeling out the edges of the story, and wondering if it was more of a short, written story, a comic book, or even a movie. At this time the story began to change to include a couple of other characters, including a female crewmember and a loudmouthed boy. Captain Andrew Logan has now entered his final incarnation - at least in terms of clothing style:

Sketch 4: showing Captain Andrew Logan, a Kid,
and a possible first incarnation of Beth Kasty
(albeit a definite prototype for Lydia Medyenkov).

I'm not sure if I had a name for the Captain at this point; I know, however, that no names were given either to the kid or the female character. The kid, by the way, was going to be the main character for a while, as we can see by the next sketch:

Sketch 5: featuring a Kid, definite Beth Kasty prototype,
and Captain Andrew Logan. In this scene, the Kid is showing
off the armor he has just purchased; Beth is reading the promotional
product description that came with it, and Captain Logan is looking
generally pissed off.

In the Kid's bland features, one can spot the first, gradual emergence of Eric Mudrow, who would be the last character to be fully fleshed-out.

One character never really had to develop at all - he just popped out of a sketch, fully-formed and already creepy. Here it is, the very first image of Ishmael Kuffing:

Sketch 6: showing a confrontation between Captain Andrew Logan
and Ishmael Kuffing.

Kuffing is the only character to have survived to this present time completely intact, complete with armor. As you will notice from these last few sketches, I was on a bit of an armor kick for a while, producing slick "scene" sketches. Their cartoony polish indicates the direction I was heading with the story: fodder for an eventual feature-length animated movie. Continuing in this vein:

Sketch 7: showing Ishmael Kuffing, standing beside
the Imsiilian despot, Tar-Prince Morgan.

As of the time these sketches were drawn, the Kid had been knocked out of the story completely; the only child left was the incorrigible Tar-Prince Morgan, supreme commander of the tiny-yet-ambitious Imsiilian Empire. Kuffing had already taken on his menacing persona, as attested to by this sketch:

Sketch 8: Showing Kuffing, being treacherous.

As the story evolved, I was torn between two interpretations of the female crewmember. I at first wanted a tough-girl type, with big shoulders and a cocky attitude - more of an Amazon than anything else. But I soon realized that the story didn't need another uber-tough character; instead, it needed a little vulnerability.

Enter the Beth from sketch 5 (see far above). She isn't stone-faced, as in her previous incarnations, and she has a scar on her face - probably a mistake in the rendering I was trying to cover up. But the idea of physical scars struck me; I thought, what makes a woman more vulnerable than disfigurement, especially in her face? Thus Beth Kasty was finally enfleshed: a scarred young woman, whose toughness, while real, is mostly a defense:

Sketch 9: Beth Kasty, next-to-last incarnation.
Her distinctive hair and double-crossed scars
are not yet apparent. Also, she has a freakishly
long arm.

Of course, I could completely get rid of my Amazon - I'd grown attached to her. So instead, I split her off from her previous protagonist incarnation, and retooled her as a villain. In this new context, her dominating personality took on chilling overtones. No longer the cocky war-woman, she became an icy huntress, using her beauty to cover a heart blacker and colder than Quaoar, circling in eternal darkness out beyond Pluto. The following image comes from Sketch 5, and gives an idea of the prototype for Lydia:

Sketch 10: Lydia Medyenkov prototype from
Sketch 5; here, she is still cast as a protagonist.

Lydia was the most difficult of the characters to deal with - not because her design was difficult; she appeared nearly fully-formed, and has stayed that way ever since. Instead, it was because of my ambivalence toward the concept of the character. The idea of an Aryan/Slavic villainess with Nazi/Soviet overtones is so completely overdone as to be practically burned over - nearly every action series (including the latest Indiana Jones movie!) has had some kind of accented dominatrix to [sexually]harass the main character.

Perhaps the difference lies in exactly what Lydia does - her raison d'etre. Firstly, she's not here for comic effect (although she has her darkly funny moments); this is one cold, hard bitch, with hardly any humanity left. Secondly, she's not playing second-fiddle to any male character, as villainesses often do. True, she may enter into contract with one of the despots or cabals running the Longshots universe; but she does so for her own ends, and nobody else's. In other words, she's more like the Joker than Darth Vader, but with a plan for universal domination.

Eric Mudrow was the last character to really join the Longshots crew, and by far the easiest. Essentially, he's me - or a comic version of me - thrown in as an "everyman". Essentially, he has no powers, no special gun, and is utterly socially inept; his only talent is for running his mouth and jumping feet-first into the worst situations. His naivete and simplicity of character provide a sounding board for the other characters, a sort of a calm center to the group.

Sketch 11: showing Eric Mudrow.

At some point in my high school career - in fact, practically all through it - I became involved in their arts program. Being the opportunistic little shit that I am, I took advantage of the time and materials provided by the art classes and produced several color comic book pages, all pertaining to the Longshots universe. Each one represents a pivotal scene in a different story - none of these are in any way connected:

Art page 1 (splash): showing Captain
Andrew Logan, being attacked by
insectlike Zamodians.

Art Page 2: showing scene from a story,
in which Eric Mudrow is admonished by
an Abronz soldier.

I also produced several paintings of characters, done in a comic book style. Here is the best of them:

Painting 1: showing Captain Andrew Logan
in a moment of contemplation.

It was at this time that I began work on Squidgods.

Cover image: Squidgods.

This story concerns the trials and tribulations of our characters on the planet Trillinilliralariarilloran. It was my first attempt at creating a comic book since Matt Darkk, and I have to admit I was feeling a little ambivalent about it. The story was better planned, surely, and was less arduous to create, but once again lack of planning and inconsistent style made it an on-again, off-again project. Just like Matt Darkk, it was mostly conceived as a test of my comic book-making powers - trying to see what I could and couldn't achieve, considering the tools I had at hand (along with printer paper, Sharpie markers and Micron pens, I also added in some ball-point pen and inkwash, for fun and laffs).

Sketch : Captain Andrew Logan,

in alien ruins.

Sketch : showing alien ruins - sculpture in palace square.

(all images copyright Rick Schlaack 2009)