Here's the fourth of the new StarStrikers model sheets. Today we're shining the spotlight on "The D-Child", Darryl Phillips.

Darryl has always been the black sheep of the team in many ways. He was the last character to be added to the quartet, and it took about two years after that before I had even the faintest idea what he was supposed to look like, and the jeans / black sleeveless vest / boots thing came about.

Further problems followed. As the smallest (human) StarStriker, getting his size and proportions correct relative to Corinne and Sylvia was difficult. During the early days of the webcomic, when the pages were B&W and Sylvs had the 'bob' hairdo, he was often mistaken for her! On other occasions, he was still often identified by non-readers as a girl. I attempted to resolve this issue by redesigning him in 2003 to more closely resemble a realistic fifteen year-old boy, but he just ended up looking like some sort of scary hobo. BAD move.

Darryl's new design, then, left me at something of a crossroads. I could either try going with the realistic route again and make it work, or I could go in completely the other direction and "chibify" him a bit. I chose the latter path, inspired by Minnie May Hopkins in Gunsmith Cats, and convinced that somehow it COULD work. Subsequently the design process for Darryl was quite different to that of the girls; whereas then I was working from human photography for reference, in this instance I was simply looking at what Kenichi Sonoda did, and to a large extent flying blind.

The development time for Darryl from beginning to end was VERY short compared to the other characters. From the time I did the initial pencils through to the finishing touches it was about three weeks. Sylvia was 2-3 months, Corinne and Lowenstein were done on-and-off over the course of 6-9 months(!) though admittedly I was busy working on other projects at the time. There was only one major stumbling point, which was the side view. The initial pencils were very poor, so I had to go back and redraw the whole thing.

I'm pretty happy with the final product. In fact, for the first time I feel like I can 'make peace' with Darryl. He blends in now, is consistent with the rest of the team in style and scale, and is generally pleasing to my eye. I'm glad that I stopped worrying about what other people were telling me he should look like, and concentrated on how I felt he should look. Though I guess for Darryl nothing beats the hobo life, stabbing folks with his hobo knife. ^_-