Pierre Speaks: Dynamos - Part 2

Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of Pierre's experience working on a project called Dynamo's. If you missed last weeks installment, you can Click here to read Dynamos Part 1.

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Last week I mentioned that after all the design work I did on the Dynamo characters, that the first issue ended up featuring none of them. Instead, it featured this lion-like dude which I kept on referring to as lion-dude, so much so that I completely forgot his name. I am sure that I still have the script somewhere on a CD, but I have hundreds of CDs and just not the strength, and time, to look through all my disks for his name.

So let’s settle with calling him “Lion-dude”.

I kind of liked the story with Lion-dude and could almost imagine him as Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown”. Love that movie. So I was trying to channel Jack’s character in “Chinatown” as I was drawing Lion-dude.

No he did not look anything like Jack. Heck I did not want him to look like Jack. But I was hoping to make him “feel” like Jack does in “Chinatown”… if that makes any sense.

Here are the character sketches for Lion Dude.







One thing that often happened in my career, when I was starting in animation, or heck when I was trying to break into animation, I was often told that my work was too “comic-book” looking.

Ironically enough, when doing comics, I often hear that my work “looks too much like animation”, or in some specific example like Lion-dude when he is in his lion persona, looked too “Disney-like”.

Oh well.

So we ended up using a different design for the lion persona which I think suxxor, so sorry, you guys will not see it. ;)

As I read an early draft of the script, I made this rough sketch of a page to try to capture the “Chinatown” feeling I was aiming for.



Followed by various pages from the first story. I opted for showing a mixture of rough sketches and finished pencils.




But sadly, this project went down the drain.

This was a case of people trying to do too many things, and too many cooks in the kitchen.

They hadn’t published a single comic yet, but already they were developing multiple comic lines (super-heroes, fantasy, etc), video games, and other stuff I can’t recall.

I have seen it many times before.

Next week I will show you some more actual pages from the comic and explain why the project feel apart.