"Project: Spiral" - Art Update #13

Right, so... still working on this one, haven't made any progress this past week.  There's been illness, doctor appointments, and we have a dead mouse in our oven and are taking increasingly-involved steps to try and get it out - just tonight, we determined that this is beyond us and we need a professional 'cuz we can't even find the fucker, only smell him.  Also, Lady M looked up hantavirus because of course she did, so now every cough has me wondering if it was wetter than the last, since Mickey or Jerry or whatever his stupid name was had been in the house for several weeks, eating and pooping, before he decided to probably die in a fire.  Grumble, grumble.  So I'm putting this out just to have something up on time, and some previous sketches from years past are below the cut.

Land's sake, why couldn't that mouse die somewhere convenient for us?



Pannych and Phyr haven't changed all that much since the old days.  I futzed around with a few ideas, but they're more or less always looked like they do now - I made Phyr shorter and thicker, and changed his plasma blasters (because they were a little too obviously inspired by various specific video game blasters), but his color scheme and armor have been like that ever since DJ and I settled on his design.

 

Blackout for spoilers.  Pretty much everything else is fair game.

Pannych was originally a boy, as I was deep in the closet at the time, and there was a whole self-discovery side plot that wound up hijacking the entire story and ended with me coming out.  But that's... not that much of a reveal, these days.  So the story has been vastly retooled.  I also made some changes to HellPhyr's design:  for one thing, he used to be called OmegaPhyr, and in the comic he was a recolored Zero sprite from Mega Man X3 (IIRC).  I wanted to make him look more original, but a few years later, I went back to the Zero-inspired look (the change below is between '03 and '06).

 

I decided to go back to the trenchcoat because, in light of all the "jaunty garb" comments, it makes sense for DJ to respond to that rather than double down on the sci-fied-out look.

Also, because I had periods of low and high art-related activity over the years, the quality of drawings in my various notebooks goes up and down over time in weird ways.  Beauty's always in the eye of the hobgoblin, or gelatinous cube, or whatever monster that saying mentions, so Your Mileage May Vary with the above drawings.  It's just something that weirded me out while I was going through my old notes and stuff to dig these up.

Anyway.  Wish us luck with all our crap to handle!