The past couple weeks I’ve been reading the Discworld series and I’m completely hooked. One of the main characters is Death, who walks around as a normal person, if a normal person were seven feet tall, a skeleton, and carrying a scythe. This character is always portrayed best when there is no regard to good or evil. Mephisto is a good example of this archetype in a completely different way. I imagined him as the cruel efficient tyrant that everyone hates but lives with because he made everything else so comfortable.

Death is also one of the agents of order that reigns in the chaos of death. This dycotomy of order vs. chaos is going to be one of the core philosphies we get to explore. Can we we really call Death evil if all it’s doing is preventing our souls from being lost? Eh, really deep stuff for a light-hearted comic but still fun considering how epic our little 5 year mission is going to be.

Something I really want to work on with this series is establishing a setting and really making the characters feel like they’re part of the world, that they exist in a real place. Cartoony or not, backgrounds establish both setting and mood. Go back to any Looney Tunes cartoon and check out the setting of any given short. I’ll use the classic, “What’s Opera, Doc?”, as my example.

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No, not the Pixar living machine flick, though I still maintain that it is by no means the worst of the Pixar/Disney masterpieces.

No, I am more referring to the ability to draw cars, more specifically to the fact that I cannot do this. I really wish I had saved the original draft of my taxi cab; this time-jumping, black hole-afflicted slick piece of American manufacturing had so many structural inconsistencies, it wouldn’t have left even the modern production lines we’re cursed to deal with. Think the monstrosities kids make their first trip through wood shop and then scale it back a bit.

So, in my fervor to complete something resembling a real-world automobile, I turned to Google. Almost immediately, I was greeted with numerous angles and sizes of taxi cabs, one of which fit my needs PERFECTLY. So, I did what any self-respecting artist would do in this pinch: I Photoshopped the heck out of the picture and called it my own.

I kid, of course. I’ll talk about the process next time, so stay tuned…