As some of you may already be aware, when I was starting down the self-publishing route my original plan for the StarStrikers novels was to only produce art for the covers. But as a means of making the books stand out from the rest of the teen-oriented product out there, and in part as a homage to the Real Ghostbusters novels by Knight Books that I enjoyed so much as a kid, eventually I changed my mind and decided to do a further fifteen or so inner pages as well. The problem was that I hadn't drawn anything in more than a year, since I did the model sheets for the StarStrikers, so I felt seriously rusty. This piece is primarily an exercise in shaking off that rust.

Something else I was provided with the opportunity to do was finally get to grips with Manga Studio, which I purchased three years ago right before I decided to wrap up the StarStrikers webcomic. As a result I never had any incentive to actually use the program and stayed within my Photoshop comfort zone. I've been using PS now since 2000 and was reluctant to start from scratch, but since I wanted a more authentic manga look for the illustrations in the novel this seemed like a good time to give it a try. As it turned out the migration wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it would be - the two applications share many of the same shortcuts and aren't entirely dissimilar, so if you're a seasoned Photoshopper getting reclimatized isn't nearly so tough. I'm still feeling my way around, but actually I'm finding MS to be much better for manga/comic illustration since it's dedicated to that purpose as opposed to PS, which is really a photo editing application that just happens to be powerful enough to be useful for comic work.

As well as new looks for the Carnage Gloves, this marks the first official appearance of the StrikerScan Visors/Headsets, Darryl's redesigned PSI switchblade, and ELLIE, Sylvia's sword. While doing my initial sketch I was trying all kinds of crazy things to make ELLIE look unique and eye-catching - one of my ideas was to have a bolt of electricity running down the blade, or have it look like a hand-held pylon. You can still see that in the design of the guard, but generally I decided to keep it simple. I drew a lot of inspiration from the Sword of Omens from Thundercats - I had the roleplay toy of it when I was a kid, which was tons of fun. My younger brother Jason had to settle for the dagger version. :-p

One of the other things I was trying to do here was give Sylvia and Darryl a little screen time, Darryl especially. They're just as much a part of this francise as Corinne and Lowenstein, but as they didn't factor into the webcomic much I always felt they were neglected. So this one is especially for the legions of devoted fans Sylvia assures me she has. And uh, Darryl too.

I guess this sort of marks my comeback as an artist. There's plenty of work to be done in the next few months not only on the material for the first novel, but also on the promotional art and content for version 5 of starstrikers.com. Eventually I'd like to have at least one illustration of each notable character in the StarStrikers universe. If I can find another ten hours in each day maybe I'll actually be able to pull it off...