Characters changing during the reboot

[Lunar-Turtle]

I think this is realatable mainly to people who at least once rebooted their own comic, because they were not happy with it. I persoanlly did it 4 times, but the last time I did it kinda surprised me how much things can change. When you have character, it will stay relatively the same, or you totally change it. In my case, I didn't really want to change that much, but the end result kinda left me staring. I guess it's kind of t a thing of getting better at anatomy and overall drawing, but really, what the hell happened over here? I just find it kinda hilarious, when i put new version next to the old one and think: this is the same character.

I wonder if you also had a similiar experience, because it's kinda funny.

Synastry | Tapas

Synastry

[darthmongoose]

Hahaha I sure did! So as a quick recap of the history of Errant, it's a very hard reboot of a comic called Fan Dan Go I made about 9 years previously, and Fan Dan Go was a reboot of FanDanGo, which was a reboot of an earlier attempt at a comic under the same name.

The Fan Dan Go versions of characters are... familiar but to an Errant reader, they feel wrong. Like they feel like bad bootleg versions of the characters.

(Also aaaaagh oh god this old art is so bad aaaaaagh I've tried to pick out some of the least bad looking panels from the old comic for the sake of my own sanity. Believe me, most of it looks worse.)

So we have Rekki, who has changed the least overall, but used to have this tragic backstory where she was a child soldier who fought in a civil war and her personality was more cocky and abrasive. I kept her design pretty much the same for chapters 1-3 of Errant because it's kind of iconic and just toned down the colours a bit.
And Subo is still the peace-loving guy with a healing aura except it only worked on him, he didn't heal others, more like Wolverine. Also he was white, which feels so wrong now. His modern design communicates the "hippie" vibe a bit more clearly. Not sure why he wears a shirt like he's going to work in an office.

Juliet Ellis went by "Juu" in Fan Dan Go, rather than Jules, which feels so odd now. They were not nonbinary in that version (I'm not sure I even really knew the concept of nonbinary existed back then in like 2008 or something, I didn't even know I was gay.) Also "Juu" had these... weird animu hair antennae, which hilariously I did try to make work in very early design sketches for Errant.
This version was more morally ambiguous and came across less playful and more scary, like you never knew if she was joking about traps or not. Despite this, the character has always been a fan favourite and was even back then.
Interestingly in all versions before Errant of the story, Juliet's sibling was called Frederick, and he was dead. When working on Errant it just helped pull everything together and give Jules a reason to be in the story if Rekki and Sarin's mentor was their older brother.

[xstarx07]

Looking at these incoming samples after 5-6 years makes me laugh and cry at the same time, but yeah, it is an experience on its own to see your artstyle and characters evolve the longer you work on a project.

Here‘s my comic‘s main group then vs now:

I can only say that I polished the designs up a little, make them look a little more distinct from each other, but so did basically every other cast member.

Then we have Riverfang, who also went through some changes besides his outfit. The most change happened with his overall character arc though, which I can not go into detail for right now for spoiler reasons.

And then we have Crystal, a character that I had literally no use for in the old version, but became one of the more important side characters in the entire Origins saga:

[feuersichel]

I only found this old titlepage on my pc xD
Basically, she lost her heels (why would you want to fight in heels???) and the big ass battleaxe. To be fair, durring that time, my story was only meant to be a one page joke... The knives on the left arm is planed for the future, but we will see, if that really will be the case xD

Very first picture of my character Osram

And here a more recent one.

Design wise I didn't change that much, even with my other characters. I refined their personalities alot though.

[igneriss]

Ohh they changed so much! 6,75 is a reboot of my old story idea- or rather, two old story ideas merged together. Some characters stayed almosted the same, some were split into two different characters, some were merged into one character (example- in 1st story there was a character A, in second story there were characters B and C. In 6,75 there is a character D that is almost as character A but takes also the role in the story of character B, and also a character E who takes 'remainings' from character B and some aspects of a character C).
... and later those new ready characters had also a redesign so the fashion in the story would be more consistent, and also to make them look more average (I'm not sure what is a correct word to use here, basically I didn't want everyone to have the same type of look).
Here are older designs of my main character:

Here's how she looks now:

Here are some others, old version on the left, new version on the right. First two are ones that got split into more characters.

[BreakingChalk]

From TMBD's Chapter 3 around July 2020

Current version for the reboot drawn around December 2021

I rushed A LOT OF STUFF during the 2020 version, but now that I'm allowing myself to draw other things besides the comic, I'm aiming to make them look more different from each other (but still cartoony and simple), cleaner drawings, better use of values, and character designs that fit their backstory/attitude better.
I'm still fighting over some decisions though.

Salamon hasn't changed that much, he's always been perf-

Well, he still was orange I guess?

[system]

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