With this page, I finally settled on Uskulon’s hat, which I based very loosely on an asian rice paddy hat. I thought that would make for a fairly simple, wide-brim hat, and unlike all the previous hat concepts, it actually seemed to work with his poncho look. I then added the straps to the back since I figured those would be nice neck protection from the elements. But the real reason for the straps is that I needed to make sure both Warsaw and Uskulon always had their necks and the backs of their heads completely covered so you wouldn’t see the Kaagan-Vas tattoos.

One last note on Uskulon: you’ll notice in all these sketches that I originally had footwear for his tentacle feet. As with Cember, I did give some thought to whether walking on snow directly would be a bit harsh or if they should have foot coverings. In the end, I decided that the foot coverings just looked a bit too silly. And I also figure with different aliens, maybe they have different physiologies, so they aren’t affected by extreme conditions the same way we would be. There are seals and walruses and penguins after all, who walk around naked all the time on snow. But then if someone gave them foot coverings, maybe they’d be grateful.

Moving on to Baso, with my first design, I gave him a duster similar in style to Warsaw’s. But then I realized that he needed something bigger and looser to hide the big gun he’s be carrying during the story. So I added a poncho similar in style to Uskulon’s. I also gave him a nose ring to (a) differentiate him facially from other Ulon Dosi characters, and (b) to give him some sort of accessory that shows his cultural break from Ulon Dosi tradition.

Reviews editor Augie De Blieck Jr. at Comic Book Resources just did a nice review of RUNNERS: Bad Goods as part of an “Off the Shelf” column. It’s been a while since the first book has been reviewed, so it’s always nice to find new people discovering and enjoying the series. I also got a nice little bump in book sales from my website Store from the article. Huzzah!

Check out the column here.

As with Warsaw, the body design for Uskulon flowed pretty easily. And also like Warsaw, you don’t really get to see much of Uskulon’s actual body in the story since he’s covered in his rustler outfit throughout. But if you ever wondered what he looked like naked, as I’m sure you have, now you know.

With Uskulon’s early outfit designs, I started with some more basic snow jacket looks, but they weren’t terribly distinctive and didn’t have any of the cowboy/Southwestern look that I wanted. A few iterations later, I settled on the 2-tiered, banded poncho look, which worked much better. The hat again proved to be the biggest challenge. Given the snowy conditions, I really wanted all of the rustlers to have big brims on their hats to shield their eyes from the elements, and it was tough designing wide-brim hats that did not look incredibly stupid.

More on Uskulon on the next page…

The Kaagan-Vas leader, Warsaw, was a lot of fun to design. With the very first full-body sketch, I pretty much had the basic look down, and then it just took a few refinement passes to really nail the design down. He may be one of my favorite alien designs to date. I like the hermit crab shell on his back, even though you never actually see it in the story itself due to the clothing.

Speaking of the clothes, back on The Big Snow Job #2, Page 20, I talked a bit about the Western influence I wanted in the rustler outfits. The cowboy duster look came about pretty easily for Warsaw. Actually, all of the rustler outfits were somewhat easy to design. The hats were the killers. As you can see in this sketchbook page, I tried to go with variations of the cowboy hat early on for Warsaw, but they just weren’t working. They just seemed too glaringly cowboy-ish in an almost comical way, like he should always be saying, “Howdy, pardner!” So I eventually scrapped the idea and came up with a different type of hat altogether.

Next up…Uskulon.

More sketches for the Kaagan-Vas rustlers, this time focusing on a few body concepts. The concept in the upper left eventually became that of Warsaw, which you’ll see more of in the next sketchbook page…