Been playing around with animated GIFs. I dunno, it’s cool seeing your characters animated…

Check out the 4th of July update too!

Here are some evolution sketches and behind-the-scenes jargon of your new favorite whatcha-ma-call-it, Dutch!

Back when this story was first being thought up there was a now-abandoned concept that The Chorg was an animal collector. We were going to see all sorts of animals, both Earthly and otherwise in the mountain, and his guards were going to be ostriches. When things went in another direction that idea fizzled out, but I liked the concept of a character with a long neck. Seeds being planted, right there. (It’s also fair to say that the emergence of Clovenhoo the Pyro-Moose stemmed from this early concept.)

Once I was confident that we’d be introducing a new batch of characters I returned to some old notes and was reminded of the ostrich and that long neck. Before long a rough design of Dutch came into existence.

For a very long while Dutch’s original name was Hutch, named after lead singer and co-founder of The Thermals, Hutch Harris. The H turned into a D pretty recently because I didn’t want to introduce another character starting with the letter H. Is that weird? Chalk it up under the creative process.

Although the rough design for Dutch turned out to be pretty solid, I did experiment a bit. At one point I looked up some ostrich pictures to see if I could pull anything else from them, playing with notions of hair, perhaps even feathers. I felt it came out looking a little too Gonzo and abandoned it. I also briefly played with the idea of removing the neck entirely, though that notion lasted about a day.

Much like I teased about there being a big secret or two regarding Sadie (if you’re just coming to the party, Sadie was hatched without legs.), there’s still a MAJOR part of Dutch I haven’t yet touched on, and can’t until it presents itself. Let’s just say the ostrich wasn’t Dutch’s only MAJOR influence. Look to the New Readers section soon for even more information regarding Dutch and that long neck and trunk of his.

So way back when the adventures of Pub were first getting started, back before the strip was even called Nomad Tofu, I was toying with this long story-arc involving Pub and a little girl. The idea of a hapless monster running into a punk kid who needed a friend seemed like a fun thing to attempt. Sadly (not that sadly) that iteration of Pub didn’t last, but instead of giving up on PUB* I retooled it and turned the concept into what Nomad Tofu has become. I’ve mentioned on twitter that I feel like I really started to get a handle on what this series was with the introduction on Aster, and that’s very true – Aster Amora’s introduction into Nomad Tofu really opened up the world, getting me to think more about the universe itself instead of Pub himself. That’s around the time the day-dreams of where we were going to head after this current story began to take off, and the little girl started to make her way back into the picture. Considering she has just been introduced I can’t get too wordy on who she is, but I am really, really excited about the world she’s a sort of gate-keeper for. Nomad Tofu is a much bigger place then some trees, caves and a mountain. We’re going to find that out quite soon, but back to Sadie.

In January, around the time I was starting to design the next round of characters, my dog of eleven years passed. Sadie was a remarkable creature. Smart as a whip, totally goofy, a love-bug. Family and friends often said Sadie was more of a person than a dog – she was always the little girl in our family. With Big Sade heavily on my mind and a character who needed a soul, at first subconsciously, I began working bits of Sadie’s personality into the character. Once I realized what was happening it became a no-brainer, and since then Sadie Phoon Bell has become a sort of celebration of Sadie’s life. If you read the comic you might notice that I have a penchant for, well, killing off characters. The world is a dangerous place and that’s something I take very seriously, and perhaps at the same time not-seriously enough. In any event, I can safely say that of all my characters from here to oblivion, Sadie Phoon Bell will never see my proverbial axe. She’s a metaphorical eternal, she’s safe. Perhaps that should’a been a spoiler alert, but if you’ve read up to now I can’t imagine you’d think otherwise.

One thing I tried to do with this next group of characters is draw them enough so they won’t evolve quite so heavily in the actual comic. I imagine they still will in the end, but this was my attempt.

I went back and forth on how I wanted to tackle the mouth specifically. Should I play it safe and go for the more ‘traditional’ Nomad Tofu look or try to expand the repertoire a bit? Saying that makes it sound like a no brainer, but the actual process of coming to the decision proved far more difficult. Also, note originally she had 3 eyes. That went away with the rottweiler-inspired markings.

Another thing I played with was how old I wanted to make Sadie. In the early days the “little girl” character wouldn’t have been much older than 6 or 7. This version of Sadie is about 11 – she’s continuing where Sadie left off, haha – in human years…who knows what that means in terms of her species . Above I note that the ‘hair is alive’. That’s a concept that will be toyed with as we progress. As-of-now, the hair does act more or less like a dog’s ears would, swaying in various ways depending on mood or an emotion – and, well, that’s about all I’ll say on the subject for now. Below is the only real sketch of Sadie’s wagon before it went into the strip. There are some slight differences in comparing the two.

We’ll be learning more about Sadie Phoon Bell in the coming weeks. There are still one or two ‘bomb-shells’ regarding the character we haven’t yet seen. I hope this was an enlightening look into the creative process, where ideas come from – all that jazz.

I realize every owner says this, but seriously -
best dog ever. Miss you, girl.

*PUB was a short-lived webcomic featuring the main character in this series, Pub. A second attempt (i.e. this comic) was also originally called PUB, but was later changed to NOMAD TOFU.