Routine Course

Have a lot of people been following Westbury Detectives? We're nearing the end of chapter two, and I really need to express that I love Cora to bits. I wanted to finally make a strong female lead who was powerful but not needlessly sexualized (I went as far as to make her asexual), and I feel I've succeeded at this. Part of my adoration might be due to how much I love drawing wavy or curly hair.

I'm planning on getting a table at Christmas Carnival 2011, but in order to get a discounted artist's table, I'm going to print a limited edition Westbury Detectives #1 with a new colour cover and some bonus pages. These pages will be available in the online edition maybe a month after the event, but I promise these are going to look great.

I'm also thinking about going to this event as Ryo Saeba from City Hunter. I've offered a female friend the idea of paying for her to get in if she dresses as Ryo's assistant Kaori Makimura, even getting her an inflatable prop mallet too, but since that seems to be going nowhere I might just turn up as Commander Lisa Hayes.

Also, I'm running Ask Giant Robo on Tumblr, where visitors send the GR characters questions and they "answer" through drawings. I'm following the guides in the official series artbook, and it's actually fun to do.

Things I Googled While Working on Westbury Detectives #1

Note: These are in chronological order, all of the following searched at some point during January to April 2011. You can kind of see the evolution of the story (along with a hint at a story about an art thief I dropped at the last minute)...

• what happens if someone builds a bar near a school
• map of Texas/New York State/New York City/Brooklyn/Westbury/Queens/Nassau County
• industries of new york
• black car
• cement factory
• cement factory hours of operation
• places that can get shot and not kill you
• 20000-names.net
• miya
• depressants drugs list
• how long does a statute or limitations last
• mulberry's saskatoon
• colours that look good with black
• cerulean blue
• video games that came out in 1989
• chinese restaurant interiors
• statute of limitations for art theft
• led zeppelin lyrics
• hospitals in nassau county
• what is pistol whipping
• how long does it take to recover from a shot wound
• how long does it take to recover from a stab wound
• new york police officer uniforms
• chinatowns in new york state
• american hospital rooms
• hospitals in nassau county
• hospitals near westbury ny

Fragments of Meldaizer

Not too long ago, Westbury Detectives Part One finished its run and is available in full here. The whole series takes a while to script, but will span three chapters in full, titled "Fragments of Manhattan", "The Chinatown Killer" and "Cry For Me". I named the chapters after tracks from Miki Matsubara's 1984 album Cool Cut because that's how I roll.

I've been writing more and more of Super Defender Gigan-X (the title's been changed, since General Kagiyama would certainly complain "fighting isn't a desirable trait."). The three pilots, Roger Ross, Emi Kagiyama and Diego Cortez have been finalized. I'll be posting almost the whole thing chapter-by-chapter on its own blog with illustrations, but...things depend on the title. Gigan-X sounds kinda dorky to me, especially since it's supposed to be a brand of military robot, and I'm considering other names. Like, stuff that sounds like it came from a 90's anime and then the German and Japanese languages exploded on each other:

Meldaizer, Keldaizer?, Giganex, Gigakaizen (especially since "kaizen" is Japanese for "change for the better"), Melkaizen, Sentodor

I'm going to run this list by a few people and see what I get. It's a bit of a pain how this is will be the second time I had to rename one of the titles previewed in the back of Cinderelliot...

Work on the Side

So I'm listening to a compilation of the Giygas background music, literally praying that the Tokyo power plant doesn't melt down, and am recovering from an embarrassing attempted call to Japan. I have a dumb little comic here to calm myself down. My method of stress relief is stupidly crude but harmless.

Behold, how a younger Jack Arthur got back together with his last girlfriend for thirty-four minutes. This is canon.

(Warning: crude language and boobs)

This is Ruth Howell, the one who stole his CDs and accidentally got shot before the current storyline. She's based directly on a Ruth I made in 2005, whom was sadly underdeveloped, despite how much Twelve Year Old Me thought she'd work with ProtoJack. I even have a couple of ancient drawings of the two getting married, back from when Becky was still a talking bird and everybody lived on a space station. I wonder how Twelve Year Old Me would have reacted if she found out that I'd later break them up over a 'stache argument.

Also, I talked to someone who asked if I'd ever continue Cinderelliot. I had to tell them that it's just a standalone and my debut work, and the characters appear "re-casted" in Westbury Detectives, but I'm happy she enjoyed Cinderelliot that much. (This sounds odd, but I always wanted someone to ask me about a sequel.) On the other hand, I wish people would stop asking to see a copy, thumb through half of it, and just hand it off to me.

Westbury Detectives Now Online

It's taken me nearly six years to do something with this story...first it was "Jack the Space Detective", then it was "Tales of the Earth Federation", then it was grounded and became something with furries, and now it's my four-part detective adventure. Each page is done with meticulous care, so pages come out maybe once a week, and randomly at best. The first issue cover and three pages are now available...

"It was such a haunting and comforting memory, though..."

Detective Jack Arthur is temporarily transferred to the village of Westbury for his own safety, following a shoot-out that wounded his girlfriend. While adapting to the laidback mood of his new agency, Jack is pulled into a rivalry with an up-and-coming mob boss, and struggles with a haunting memory from when he was five years old.

It was a strange process cutting up Westbury Detectives to resemble something more realistic than it used to be. I've never done more research on Nassau County than I've done in this last two months. I cut a subplot about a female character dressing as a male thief with a robot face, because that sort of doesn't fit in anywhere. I turned Westbury from this insane techno-metropolis to what it really is: a simple little village in New York state, but in this case, there's a crime syndicate passing through it. Anybody following the characters since 2005/2006 will recognize them all over the place and the drastic changes they've gone through.

I really love this story at the moment, and I hope you all will too. I almost wish I could talk to my thirteen-year-old self and compare versions closely with her...

Crashing Into 2011

So, Hyperspace Bunny #6 really should have been finished by now, but due to this being the final exam season, I've of course had to set aside the next page in favour of working on things like an Interior Design poster, a Japanese 30 poster, and two different essays for History.

Skipper the Robot Kid has been renamed Android Girl A.M.I., and A.M.I. is the only particle of the show whose character design hasn't changed at all from the 2006 original. I actually need to keep a text file with all the changes I'm making in strict detail, since I know I'll slowly forget it all. It's going to be good.

Now, I know I mentioned Westbury Detectives in the "Coming Soon" section in the back of Cinderelliot. (Speaking of which: Cinderelliot is now available to order online.) It's going to be three chapters long, have a giant mash-up of my characters, and focuses on a young detective trying to deal with two different supercriminals and an accident that happened when he was five. It's been in constant development since 2005, and it went from being this massive crime-fighting epic to a mini-series; just like melting down plastic, every time something new is made of it, it gets smaller. I like Neo-WD.

And, in non-sequitor news...I had a dream where I had to bike through a dangerous part of town, and there were billboards advertising drugs. One of them called marijuana "Shigeru", and I started freaking out in the dream, since I've got a Major Shigeru Kagiyama in Gigan-X. I'm still reeling over how 1/4 of Cinderelliot's fans are stoners (ohgodwhy), but after waking up, I realized nobody would nickname a drug with a male Japanese surname.

I hope.

Merry Christmakwanzanukah Solstice!

I was inspired by a Giles strip while working on this. It look two days of planning and sketching, and two more days to ink and apply the grey marker. May Ray (holding the streamer) is one of my oldest characters that I still like, whom I've put in a comic for the first time in two years. There's another four characters that I haven't quite yet put online yet...

Cinderelliot: Elliot/Cain, Miles/Arbrook, King, Pinhead, Fairy Godfather

Westbury Detectives: Mara Wright (all of the above are also in this, but still...)

Hyperspace Bunny: Bunny, Ray Hatcher

Skipper the Robot Kid: Sarai Mizuno, A.M.I., Robby Phillips, Bunny2000, Sera (from the remake)

Quinn: Rick Jones

Our Own May Ray: May Ray

The 27 Ghosts of Endo: Endo Hiramatsu (that guy about to get copped by the Godfather)

I'm also in the picture frame!

As soon as I finish some maths homework, I've got some model sheets of The 27 Ghosts of Endo to post. It's based on a dream I had (which I encorperated into an episode), and odds are that it's going to be my next project.

For anyone interested, this was the Giles strip I was inspired by...

I give you, Jack Arthur

Also, Becky Byrd the human. I'm going to keep her like that and make her Dr. Byrd's adopted daughter.

New Jack Arthur = Kenji Murasame + Kelly Johnson + David Tennant + Spike Spencer

If you saw the original WDA comics, you'd find that Jack was originally a pretty big moron who was incapable of working alone. Such is defunct, and now he's much easy to draw and operate.

Pinhead and Birdbrain's logo, with bonus katakana.

Westbury Detectives - 2004 to 2009

I'm planning another comic, but given how many projects I've had since 2001 and the sheer volume of some of them, I need to choose one that'll be fairly easy to remake. I'm either going to go with a 20-page booklet of four-panel strips revolving around a group of kids (Quinn), or a science fiction parody based on the Japanese super-girl genre of the 1980's (Hyperspace Traveller Bunny/ ハイパースペースバニー). I made a webcomic called Skipper the Robot Kid, but dropped it two years ago in favour of remaking it completely, so I think it's time to bring out something I haven't touched in a while. This is...

L-R: Jack Arthur, Bearis Grizzley, Mara Martin (now Wright), Becky Byrd, Dr. Byrd, Princess Tahara, Queen Maga, King Byar (these three are all defunct)

...Damn.
Westbury Detectives is a massive and bizarre project that has unsuccessfully been trying to come out for the last five years. It centred around Jack Arthur, a young detective, and his coworkers at a bizarre detective agency. Originally, they were a planetary defence force. Just imagine Darkwing Duck, Duck Dodgers, and The Great Mouse Detective, all rolled into the worst proverbial sushi ever. There were random animal people because I may have been a furry from ages 12-13.

I need to explain the frequent prescence of Dr. Edward Byrd and his daughter Becky...I've been thinking of having Dr. Byrd, when he was a non-anthropomorphic child, be put through a "humanizing machine" and raised by a researcher as her son. Then years later, they put another chick into the machine and made it his daughter. More later...

These are the villains, which in 2005, included a self-aware hand puppet and a talking chicken. They briefly changed to the West Maulers, which is just as bad. Basically, four of these people are remotely re-usable to me. The bat girl (Batricia) was a thief who later joined the WDA to pay back the city. Pollenatra was a rip-off of Bushroot, whom was a Poison Ivy parody, and I've only now remade her:


Dr. Byrd's mother Laura, top righthand corner. I decided that Pollenatra would be a Dr. Polly Nathan, who was pushed into that machine by her fiance whom was opting to murder her. She got blended with a plant, thought Jack Arthur put her in, and she steals the machine. She's probably too legally-risky to use, but I like her better now.
The boy is "Birdbrain", whom was the second guy in that earlier picture. BB has gone from being a midget with a bird living in his head, to an amnesiac teenage midget with patchy hair, to a naiive orphan with a full head of hair. I've redesigned both Pinhead and Birdbrain, due to the fact that I stole them from a Little Audrey short. Neo-Birdbrain is sort of based on Sludge from the Astro Boy movie; he was raised by his pickpocket uncle, then inducted into Pinhead's gang. This Pinhead is indeed the same guy from Cinderelliot.


Behold Emma Bishop, a normal-seeming woman who occasionally pulls of high-tech robberies while dressed as Haut Kunstlich, a supposed cyborg man. Cain/Elliot and Arbrook/Miles are her assistants. She's my favorite new character in Westbury Detectives.


Here's the updated cast! Bearis Grizzley, I'm cutting you out. Mainly because you're a damned talking bear.

Mara Wright's new design came to me in an abrupt vision, and when I tried drawing her as the above, her personality developed in a day. Keep in mind that she had existed for five years prior. Jack's new personality is coming in, but the problem is that I don't know at all how to give him a brilliant, original design. I'm planning to somehow blend Black Jack, Spike Spiegel and the Tenth Doctor...