Page Commentary No. 108

Psu: This is our second Smug cover right?

Gunwild: Yes, after the Lefyne one.

Psu: This is probably one of my favorite drawings though it does remind me I should've done more testing on how to draw bubble gum. It's funny but that's the one thing she never does in the main series.

Gunwild: Maybe it was prop gum! They're always giving you things to play with on photo shoots.

Psu: Heh. Here's some interesting factoids. I don't recall how much we've talked about the development of Minx's character or about how she and penny were characters from our older comic concepts but I think we were both very interested in introducing them into Cassiopeia.

Gunwild: Yeah. Plus she's inspired by your cool cyborg version fanart of Cassandra Cain from DC comics.

Psu: Yes she is also that. But with a lot more blue. I'm not quite sure why I made her colors blue and black. A lot of this cover actually doubles as concept art because I hadn't taken the time to make design sketches. So there's a lot of things that I like, like the added latex and the helmet. Her helmet would get much simpler in future drawings. Things like her glowing eyes were specific to this comic cause I wanted to make her look different than the other characters in Cassiopeia. 

Psu: Her bike was pretty much designed right on this page. We hadn't revealed Cassiopeia's bike (or would it be speeder?) yet but I knew what that was going to look like. Cassiopeia's machine was taking inspiration from red muscle cars. Minx's machine was a lot of curves.

Gunwild: Just like her!I didn't contribute nothin' but the text. Like how the Delta Quadrant is the worst quadrant! It's the one where Star Trek: Voyager happened.

Psu: I think of Voyager fairly fondly, like I know it's the "not as good" one but it's still part of the family! It feels right in line with the franchise as I knew it groing up! Anyawy... uh... other design notes. I had to think a lot about the "knife feet." In the original comic she was drawn for, Minx had these knife feet, which were a design note that I borrowed from the Zone of The Enders mecha designs. And I had to include them here BUT I wanted to have her able to push a traditional bike pedal. So I had to come up with this shell that would attache over her blades. It's probably good to keep them for safety reasons, not to scuff up the floors either.

Psu: More design notes to think of... Minx in this body is wearing a body with an actual neck instead of the usual cyborg actuators you see in the rest of the comic. I had considered just painting her body a skin tone but I was losing ways to show off that she's a cyborg just from this image. She gets a few more of those cyborg notes back, in later designs. In particular the pinups!

Gunwild: You like your cyber-components... we've already had our first request for a Spider-Botz pinup, you know.

Psu: This might sound cheap, but it's a situation where we're so far in the future that it can possible conflict with what a reader would "expect" from the future. Like it's harder to excuse away robots that look like robots, when it's probably easier to replicate human bodies than it is to fly faster than light. BUT, if I did have cyborgs that looked just like humans, then that adds a certain layer to the story that doesn't fit our light sci fi feel. We might get into Ghost in the Shell territory where you wouldn't know someone was a cyborg or you'd expect everyone to be a cyborg. So having components that let a reader know Botz is a cyborg and Cassiopeia is all human, was important. Though I imagine, if the story demands it, we have a certain amount of wiggle room.