Marc had the characters of Randy Babylon and Ascot bouncing around his head for a while. Randy is the guy who has everything go stereotypically “well” for him with little effort and whines about it all the time. His brother Ascot hasn’t had the same luck…
So in order to play up the Looney Tunes aspect of the sibling rivalry, we made Ascot his visual opposite.
- Tall : Short
- Luxurious Hair : Balding
- Easy going body language : Total spaz (hence the long arms for dramatic poses)
- Bright colorful clothes : All black suit
We gave them both the same chin though – genetics is a powerful beast.
I sketched out the story on Procreate on my iPad 3. I don’t do a lot of directly digital art, but it’s great for thumbnails and sketching. I can fire off some thumbnails directly to Marc and then get the action beats. I sweat and anguish over thumbnails so that when I’m doing the final art I can right in to pencilling and inking – which I do at one time a lot of the time.
Marc and I have worked together for over a decade so my thumbnails are a lot rougher for him then they are for new collaborators. But even for new projects I tend not to figure out tons of detail yet. I need to get the storytelling down though.
If I remember right, he had a few ideas for some other Randy Babylon shorts batting around at the same time that follow a similar pattern but end up telling a complete arc about the brothers.