Cpt Wayne and the Unexplained Dimension

I did say last week I would be telling you about the Fronglers today but this week’s comments on page 53 made me want to give you some insights as to how I went about designing the Captaincy Blobsters. Blobsters? Waht in the world is a blobster? Bear with me for a second.

I bet some of you have been wondering if a Captain is equipped with some kind of weapon or at least a way to defend himself against potentially hostile opposition. Since the Captaincy exists as a peace keeping and moderation organisation, none of its weaponry has any destructive power. The idea is to neutralise the threat and engage in a dialogue, giving all parties involved a chance at a diplomatic resolution. The Blobster was build with that philosophy in mind.

Early on, I had imagined the Blobster to have a much more conventional look. They would materialise in the Captain’s hand when needed, readers familiar with the works of Akira Toriyama will know what I’m talking about. I always loved the capsules used in Dragon Ball which would spontaneously make cars or buildings appear. In the end, I just didn’t think it fit in with the style I was developing, especially since I was working hard to give the world of Captain Wayne a detailed, believable feel where everything you see has been designed and engineered. Forms follows function.

So, the Blobster model you see on page 53 is stored in Wayne’s shoulder pads, allowing him to carry two at a time. The keenest observers amongst you might ask: “How come the Captaincy badges – hence, the Blobsters – are all of sudden much larger from page 48 on?” Wayne does carry two blobsters at all times, his regular outfit is the latest standard in Captaincy apparel for standard investigations including much smaller and lightweight weaponry. The older and more heavy duty models Wayne is talking along right now are more reliable, powerful and have much faster reload times than the sleeker and more portable modern blobsters.

Next week, I’ll be looking back at how the Fronglers came to be, for sure. It was a long and painful gestation so there will be lots of sketches and renderings.

I bet you must be wondering how a place like this was just left behind and forgotten about! Well, I’m not here to give you answers. Not today.

So let’s focus on the development of this thing. It wasn’t until I started working on the final pages that the Captaincy base on Sol-Y-Sis got it’s final design. The first image in the gallery (not the thumbnail) is a ballpoint sketch I made in a sketchbook while I was still playing around with the idea for the climax of this first story. The other three were done probably a year later when I started painting digitally in Painter.

Eventually, the whole design of the place went a different direction but there are a few elements in these sketches that helped me define the look I was looking for. This building was obviously built a long time ago. You can tell by how the local flora has taken over and by the corrosion of the appliances depicted in page 51. World building is a tricky thing. You can pretty much do anything you want but in my book, there’s one rule of thumb: it has to make sense. If it doesn’t, you better have a good reason.

I decided to design the early years of Captaincy architecture and industrial design as an homage to 1950′s sic-fi movies. In a strange way in made sense to me and I just went with it. As you might have noticed, the spaceship in the background has a distinctive look that instantly gives it it’s place in time when you compare it to Wayne’s Seeker 9.

There is, you might have guessed, a whole of things that happened here at some point in time. Events that led to the depravation of this -in it’s heyday- high-tech facility. I’m going to let you imagine that for now because that’s part of how I like to tell stories. I want to give you the room to let your own imagination wander off.