Mythical May

One of my big Pet Peeves are these certain things that I feel do not make sense for Mythical creatures (I know they're not real, but imagination does not have to ignore biology). So for the a few of the posts in May will be dedicated to me analyzing these fantasy creatures, explaining what I think does or does not make sense about them, and then thinking up ways to anatomic anomalies.

I'm not putting this the right way, so Just take this 1st one as an example. Today we look at the Centaur.

Now the Centaur is the half man half horse connected at the Neck/waste. I can look past the Duplicate organs, but what really doesn't make sense to me is how this guy breaths.

Seriously, Horses have big noses and big nostrils, while human Noses are far smaller. Despite this not only does the centaur only have a human knows, but it has a second set of lungs and even more body mass to keep supplied with oxygen then your average horse. Unless these beasts are masters of Fermentation, or they story oxygen when needed for short physical bursts, I can't see a centaur respirating properly with that tiny nose.

My Take on solving this is Gil-like nostrils located where the horse part and the man part meet. It's kind of like a dolphin's blow hole, or something along those lines.
I also Added a top hat, because the Centaur in this picture was grumpy. He's grumpy because the top hat is too tight on him.


So there we go. It's not exactly a professional take on this stuff, but I think it should prove interesting.
Over the month we'll be looking at...
Winged humans (feathered, webbed, and jetpacked... well not jetpacked)
Mermaids
Cyclopses
and even some more recent things like Pokemon
Also, I have this great concept for Zombies I want to show you.

The Lost Episode of Ask PC

I didn't think I'd ever end up letting this see the light of day. Despite having some jokes that I consider my best work, the animation was just terrible (especially in the car ride scene, it looks like a 2001 flash cartoon!), and the voice acting for the Hitchhiker was even worse.

The big reason I gave up on the cartoon was the ending I had planned out was just not going to happen because the concept was really lousy, frankly. It was originally a mean spirited parody of The Mourner by charlie zero, in which Vic and Sean would basically pull a bugs bunny on the guy. I finally decided to make it less and less about the mourner, but the more I messed with the plot from the inside out the more confounded it became. It went out of control like a panicked cat and I had no choice but to drop it.

My last attempt to salvage this can be noted in the final scene (after the cheese-it joke). It's really quality work and it shows some of the techniques I applied to future cartoons like Ico Parody and BBB, but it wasn't enough to save the project. Instead of that last scene saving AskPC3, it got taken down with it.

But since you guys are used to seeing my scraps, You probably won't mind this being so unfinished. (BTW Mockarina of time Master Quest was about 5 times as broken as this was):

Opening:


Scene1


Scene2


Scene3


(I used Photobucket instead of Youtube, because I don't really want this movie getting out too much)

I think this was a joke I was going to shoehorn into it somewhere. The reference is already obscure after only 2 years.

PC Month Part6: A tale of Two Sean's

There's probably a word for when a person's character falls so far from his own context (Almost ALWAYS because of abusively breaking the 4th wall) that he splits into two characters entirely. It's Probably called creative Mitosis or something. Whatever the word for it is, it happened to Sean, and to Vic as well.

I didn't notice it for a long time, because I was using the Ask PC versions of those two to develop the character of their original selves. However the changes grew too different to ignore and I suppose it finally dawned on me when I had decided to do the unthinkable... to take away Sean's goofy one sleeved sweatshirt.
Wearing the same sweatshirt everyday, especially when your in a war, and especially when one of the sleeves is torn off, was way too silly for Sean's character. So I gave him a Plated vest (or something along those lines) and for the sake of tradition I covered up his right arm with a unique cape. I even gave the Cape a little background: It's a weapon cloak of the Theaklin people who used to use it as a way of concealing their weapons just before a duel to surprise the opponent. Sean wears it mainly for tradition as he always uses a spear.

Now this weapon cloak worked great for the more serious Sean, but I couldn't get myself to add it to the other Sean, as fans had already identified with the odd sweatshirt. and that's when I realized there WAS another Sean. And my work became just a little easier

And so On January 31st, I brought back Sean and Vic from Ask PC by making them apart of the Meow productions opening. and shortly after that, they stared in their first cartoon in 2 years "Not the Puppy."
And the original Sean Would later Make an appearance of his own in "Heeeey Terrene." Even though it was a humorous little flash, it was all in canon to his own world and it never broke the fourth wall.

And that's the Story of Sean and how he turned from an extra in the background to main character, to lead role, comedic, and finally to two different people entirely.

Tomorrow I've got a really big treat for everyone. You won't want to miss this.

PC Month Part5: Sean's Curroption Courtasy of ASK PC

The Ask PC comic ran for a good year and a half, but unfortunate events happened in fall of 2003 that caused the tragic cancellation of the comic. The first thing that happened was the website I used as an outlet couldn't afford keep itself free and I couldn't afford to keep all my pictures there anymore. Luckily I was able to save all of my work on a CD, but...
The second thing that happened was the CD corrupted and all my archives were gone. It didn't devastate me but not having the archives of the Ask PC comic any more (save for the few that were on the hard drive) made continuing the comic rather pointless, and I was running thin as it was.

Sean and Vic didn't die that day, but they were homeless (especially after I was kicked off the site for getting on the bad side of a Uruguayan moderator who was a bit too into beyblades and Sailor moon). Luckily I had discovered Newgrounds.com earlier that year (I had been spending the whole year with grand dreams of creating the next Eskimo Bob, or Arrogancy) and my older brother had recently got his hands on Flash 7 which he was happy to let me use. Now I was going to wait a year to get used to flash before I brought Ask PC back in the game, but like my first entry, a little experimenting suddenly became a full cartoon and AskPC: Explosions are Fun was created, as well as an immediate Sequel which was uploaded on April of 2004 (the second PC month).
In hindsight, Waiting a year would have been good. With limited knowledge of things tween easings and an overuse of symbles and mask layers, This cartoon did not age well.

Tragically, though, when I finally realized how flawed my process was, I was already half way complete with AskPC three and Mockarina of time Master Quest. Both projects were simply unsalvageable, no matter how much I tried.

I put Sean and Vic back into Incubation, until I could figure out how to continue ask PC. But There was a bigger conflict in me that I hadn't even realized until today.
When Vic and Sean were first created, they were the heroes. They were fighters in a complicated world full of villains and war and monkeys.
But everytime I presented them online, they were less and less Canon to their own story. When Sean was Revived, if you remember, he was revived because of a chibi drawing of himself, and in the way that's what he still was at that point.

But I still was not sure if the world that they left behind was worth returning too. After all, the Same attitude that created their world was what created the god awful spiked hair of Sean's. In the back of my mind was the thought that After six years of working on that project it had amounted to nothing; It was just the overthought fairy tale on the foundation of a preteens fanfics. If I was going to go anywhere with that story, I had to start fast.

Vic and Sean had two paths ahead of them:
1) Throw Their world away, and Continue Ask PC with Sean and Vic as my mascots and not as heroes.
2) Or abandon Ask PC and Bring them into a world they may not have a place in anymore.

You may not understand what I mean when I say this but... I left this choice up to them. When you develop a character enough, their able to make their own choices, and Vic and Sean were able to make theirs. When I got an answer, I realized something I should have noticed in 2002 (and didn't understand until today).


Tune in tomorrow for a dramatic conclusion. As always, Feel free to ask Questions.

Garde' knows what it takes to be cool!

It's odd: I watched the series when it first came out, and for the past few years I've had it on in the background quite often. I own a few of the branch off games, and as you all know I've made almost an hour's worth of films starring Ash Ketchem. I'm even one of the very few people who actually bought Drill Dozer, and yet I've never played one of the main series pokemon games.

Well I just picked up Diamond today and I'm going to see how this stuff is firsthand. I'm trying to connect with Barrytoon soon and try out the online in it. I'll post up the damn friend code soon enough.
Anyway, To celebrate, I've made this little sketch.

Yes it's the pimped out Gardevoir... well kinda, She just has some Shades, a short cut skirt, and a gold embroidered whatever the hell that thing is...

I don't think I should have gone with this pose, and the rest of the sketch is off in so many ways- mostly in the torso area because of the left arm the that other thing.
I'd work on it more, but I ran out of time.

None the less, that is one stylish Saanaito.

(PC month part 5 tomorrow)

PC Month Part4: Sean's Return from Pergatory

On October 23rd of 2001, I made my debut to the online world uploading my fun little doodles to a fanart site. Most of the Pictures uploaded were of Vic in which he would do wacky things like fight armies of pencils get eaten by a hippo and... run facing profile in a random background. I had also uploaded at least one picture of every character from Vic and Sean's Story except of course for Sean because of his terminal case of carnivorous hair.

Well One day in the winter of 02, I decided to just go ahead and draw him anyway. I decided to Draw a chibi version of Him, because I had recently done a series of chibi versions of all the other characters (I know it's dorky, but I was 14, lay off).

So I made this Chibi of Sean. He has the standard superdeformed body with simpler detail- I even began drawing a simpler version of his hair. But as I drew the hair I began (FINALLY) fleshing out a much much better hair design for the character. It looked much more like hair and hair that followed the laws of physics. Now it still needed more work before it became the Sean that all of you know, but it was pretty good compared to my other work at the time, and it also trickled down to the rest of Sean's Details: His face and personality became oh so much more Smug (which was a godsend compared to that bugeyed village idiot look) and while you can't really see it in this chibi version here, his build became a lot sleeker which is helpful for his clothing style.
Sean was not just Saved by this new design, he was reborn, even his role in the project he originated from changed drastically from this. Before he was an inexperienced moma's boy who was eager to prove himself and after this he became an arrogant conflicted warrior who was mourning his dead mother (he did not kill his mother).

But I'm Digressing now. I now had a presentable design for sean and I was ready to share it with the people who were following my work (I think there were 2 followers). And since this character who was so important had been neglected for so long up until this point, I decided to make an event out of it. That event was PC Month.

Every Picture I uploaded to the web on that month had Sean in it, Even if I had to just nudge in a small version of him like here:Oh Hey look, It's Malloy again. Why does he keep coming back on this blog... Anyway to top off PC month I made a ten part comic series in Which Vic and Sean would answer questions from the reader (whether they be made up or someone who actually read it. Seriously the comic had an average of 15 views). The comic was of course Ask PC. And it wound up going on for another 35 comics.

And here's the rest of Sean's Drawings before I moved on to flash. I'm not going to go into story.

So All that's left to talk about is how sean has adapted to the grand world of flash (and I may include a pretty special surprise).
Still, All the old artwork is probably wearing you guys out. So I might have some newer sketches for friday.

The Cast of Luik: part 4, The Hero (alive)

First of all, his name isn't Luik. His name was not Luik when I started this project, and though it may have been his name sometime during the production, his name is not Luik now.
I'll reveal who Luik is in the cast of Luik Part 6, but for now, we talk about the (currently) nameless hero.

For those of you familiar with the Legend of Luik, you will notice that this picture here is from before his home was destroyed.
His earliest memory was that of his Grandfather being gone. He could never remember his grandfather, but he remembered when he was gone: he remembered his father telling him that his grandfather was dead. Much of his idle time as a young child was thinking about the what dead was, and this was tricky because he had never encounter someone dieing in his life, only them no longer being around after their death. He decided for himself that Death meant a person could no longer be a part of his life.
In his Eyes only people other than himself could be dead. After all, he thought, how could he be separated from himself? This is what comforted him, for he was all too scared of what happened to those who died. At this time he was six years of age and a young girl had made a habit out of watching him; his fate was sealed.

When Luik was chosen by Katharina, the girl's father made it a point that this boy would become the strongest man in their village. Having the very leader of the village as a mentor was an honor, but between the daily endurance training and the constant nuisance following him around he began to wonder if after death was so scary after all.
But he eventually grew fond of the Girls company, and he became more interesting in progressing his training himself.
As he grew more fond of Katharina he began to worry about her own death. A time could come when she would no longer be a part of his life. This would not be a problem much longer as he would soon learn with his own eyes what death really was. His Village was under attack, and the force was so desperate that there was no way they could have survived. His eyes became clouded in the chaos and all of his training was useless. ...

The next thing he knew everyone around him was as cold as the earth and their bodies were destroyed. Nothing of what his village had been was left; his home, his village, and his life were gone. He now knew what happen to those after they died. He no longer feared it, and without fear of death, and with his eyes still clouded with chaos, the now dead Luik could see one thing and one thing alone. Katharina was not among the bodies... he had nothing to lose from pursuing the ones who took her.


And that's the Story of the hero's Life, Next Month, we'll take a look at what he considers his death, although at that time a full version of Legend of Luik will finally be available (and because of Deviantart's Licensing regulation this preview will only be available on the blog).

Tune in tomorrow for part 4 of PC month. Did I ever fix Sean's Atrocious hair? Find out tomorrow!