I am now, as I occasionally have been in the past, gone.  Being gone as I am, and being a generally busy sort of guy, you may notice with dismay that, instead of comics for updates, you will find a series of concept sketches from a while ago.

            Shudder your disgust and dismay you poor, put-upon readers.  Then, when you’re quite finished, join me on a fun-filled explanation of what you see!

            Today’s installment is my concept sketch of Estella.  Which you probably gathered, being clever as you are. 

            But first, lets talk about the ether from which Estella spawns.  Upon completion of what I now call “Freshman Year” of the comic, it was my plan to return to the simple days of “funny strips” which are essentially the four-panel funnies that are entirely meant to be humorous and do not contain an overabundance of plot.  I had two reasons for doing this: I was asked to by both of my readers, the primary one being Girdy; and I have a ton of them sitting around waiting to be used.

            Yet there were these insistent voices from the message board that kept telling me “You don’t have enough strong female characters in the comic!” and “We want more female characters in the comic!” the second statement was probably obvious in light of the first.  At any rate, I kept reminding these voices that I am a guy, and as such, I had no confidence in my ability to create realistic, deep female characters with any accuracy.  Inside I was thinking more along the lines of “how am I going to fit female characters in my funny strips?”  Because, as we all know, women are not funny.

            Now I grant you that starting my creation of deep, realistic women with an alien monster from outer space was probably a step in the wrong direction, but there you have it.  That’s how I see women.  Now seems as good a time as any to give a shout out to all my shorties from the message board.  Keep it real, lay-deeeez.

            Seriously, though, and I have mentioned this before, after I finally create the female characters, I have received nary a comment from the women on the message board, or any other women, for that matter, about my ability to draw and characterize women.  I guess that’s a polite “we don’t want to tell him he sucks” sort of quiet.  A nice kind of quiet.  All I can say, ladies, is that you were warned.

            Okay, that’s out of my system.  Time to talk about the sketch you see.  As you may notice by illustration (a.) Estella is naked.  I guess I wanted to see if I COULD draw a naked women floating in creative juices, so to speak, before I tried it for real.  Imagine how red my face would be if I fell flat on that particular venture.

            I wanted a perky school-girl look for Estella once she got all cleaned up and shuffled away into college life.  In her attempt to fit in, she distinctly does NOT fit in.  She has a child-like awe of the world, having been very recently cast out into it.  Ironically, I think I captured her better in this concept sketch than I ever have in the comic.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.