The bartender in panel 1 only shows up a couple times: here and in issue #5, but I like the design a lot. I’m sure that alien species will turn up again. I do think I should have established him as the actual bartender before this panel though. My original intention was to show him rather prominently behind the bar counter in some of the previous scenes, but there never seemed to be enough room. The other things happening in the bar (Cember and Roka enjoying a moment, the police coming in, bumping into Hamron at the bar) all seemed much more important to focus on than finagling a way to shoehorn this guy into the scene, so his intended establishing shot got cut.
When designing characters, I like to make alterations to physiology for alien races, even if it’s something slight. I especially like to tweak the hands so that all aliens don’t just have human hands. Ril, for example, has two central fingers, with two opposing thumbs on each hand (and bulbous tips). Likewise, the Jondhi aliens have a single central finger, with two opposing thumbs as well.
I do try to bear the hand structures in mind when designing weapons for those characters. In this case, the Jondhi have gun grips suited to their unique hand grasping shapes. The last thing I wanted to do was design a unique alien hand only to have them use guns with human-hand-style grips.
In the next story arc, The Big Snow Job, I actually have Ril using binoculars for a good portion of the story. I found it a bit funny that my first pass on the binocular design was pretty similar to regular binoculars, until I realized the eyepieces couldn’t fit around Ril’s horn to get even close to his eyes! Needless to say, that involved a slight re-design.
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