Author Archive: DigitalSocrates
I do webcomics, many of them of questionable taste and sanity. You can find my collection of work on tumblr (digitalsocrates.tumblr.com) or if you prefer it not diluted by random reblogs and webcomic news, at my websites comicrehab.com and cyphimedia.com. I also update my deviantart once in a blue moon (cyborgphilosopher.deviantart.com).
26_Howard
Howard is a senior employee and inventory manager at CPU Central, the company that Theodore and Delaney work at.
He’s a little rough around the edges, particularly around the engineers and builders who tend to be younger and more multi-cultural, as opposed to the first generation chinese immigrants that make up the shipping and management departments of the company. His attempts at humor often come up short, which only encourages him to be more taciturn and gruff.
He takes his work very seriously and runs a very strict ship on inventory. Even if he didn’t keep rigorous check out logs for testing equipement he’d be able to track down missing items just by memory in most cases.
Howard is married with an elementary age daughter, born in america. They live in a middle class apartment in a nearby primarily asian community.
25_Theodore
Say hello to Theodore, coworker and partner in crime to Delaney. Theodore and Delaney work at CPU Central, a computer store in Industry, California. They both met when they joined the company as low end factory-line workers putting together lines of mass-produced PCs. Delaney was eventually promoted up to an engineer, but the two departments share one giant warehouse space so they still see plenty of each other.
Theodore lives with his retired stay-at-home father, ailing mother, senile grandma, and three younger siblings. While working full-time to supplement his father’s meagre retirement income he also attends night school at a local city college, working towards a degree in Ethnic Studies and Sociology.
Life at the house is pretty hectic usually so he will often head over to Delaney’s place to study or spend some free time.
24_Delaney
Todays unpolished sketch brought to you by ‘didn’t feel like drawing today but did it anyway.’ I apologize.
This is Delaney. She works at a computer store and fixes computer stuff. In her off time she remixes music. Her youtube channel has a small but devoted following, and she’s convinced she can make it big if she makes one big hit (or at least comes up with the an advertising scheme to get the next big hit). Bottom pic is her working on some music. While she loves working on it, any artist can tell you that there is a lot of tediousness in any project and she just happens to be working on one of those tedious segments.
23_Hondo
20_Handumas, 21_Nameless Child, and 22_Mowah
These are the characters of a potential short story Fool’s Tales set in the A Jagged Road world. It’s about a handumas (a title, not a name, meaning Caretaker) who is telling stories to a young child (left nameless, and also the plan is to leave him/her genderly ambiguous). The story in question is about Mowah, the First Merchant, who travelled the world, exploring strange lands, learning and trading goods, meeting strange people and supernatural creatures. Mowah was a real historical figure, but her legend has mixed with the facts, becoming a truly larger than life character.
19_Serif
Another Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines character. Is that cheating?
Anyway Serif is a Tremere, who is a vampire clan rumored to have been a clan of humans that raised themselves to vampires through self-studied magic. Â She is a master of Thaumatology, or blood magic, as well as Domination – so she can command someone to die, and if that doesn’t work she can just magic all the blood out of their body. The game loaded her with a kind of sexy-librarian look, but as the case with Escher, the game gives little in the way of outfit customization besides each clan coming with a preloaded set of four outfits that give different ‘armor’ values, so here she is with a reinterpreted wardobe. I pushed the ‘librarian’ bit, giving her a head bob to go with her glasses – there for style purposes only, I assume.
Serif revels in the simple joy of manipulating people, through lies, intimidation, seduction, what have you. That said she takes no pleasure in violence and dislikes killing people, avoiding it whenever she can. Serif is ambitious, and doesn’t mind brown-nosing to do it. She has an eternity to wait for the proper opportunities, so she keeps the witty retorts and vitriolic slurs that are ever on the tip of her tongue wrangled in the presence of anyone she thinks can remotely be of use to her.
18_Tadashi
I ran through a bunch of monkey pictures and picked one that I liked – the Golden Lion Tamarin. After that I had a vision of a guy with a kendo stick on his shoulder so i just ran with it from there.
In hindsight I should have picked a Japanese monkey instead of a brazillian one, but what can you do?
Lessee… Tadashi Platyr. Japanese monkey swordsman. Stoic, perhaps a bit brash, pretty archetypal. Didn’t really have any unique personality or background in mind for him. I guess that’s pretty boring, sorry.
17_Nomia
This marks my second and more effective attempt to create a fantasy/sci-fi character useable in a potential porn comic. Significant credit for influencing facial style (particularly in the nose/lips area) goes to Ovens. Not much story behind Nomia besides she’s a bee. Most of the imagery here developed as I drew her and looked for references. Originally I had planned for her just to be an inexplicably anthropomorphosized bee in some weird world where sentient bees still had menial labor to collect honey.
Potential storlines included:
- While collecting nectar, Nomia finds a vibrating flower stigma. Sexy solo times ensue.
-  Nomia returns to the hive after a  long day of nectar collecting and has sexy times with her girlfriend (almost all bees are female)
- Nomia spills nectar onto a drone and has to make it up to him
16_Cog
Cog is a robot in a world of robots (who built the robots or where the creators went is left unexplained, as is common in these kinds of stories), who has left his job of manual labor in order to become a fiction writer. Hour long days of drudgery give his mind time to wander and contemplate the greater world and convince himself that he is a veritable fountain of stories that need to be told, held back only by the time he needs to put them to (digital) parchment. Upon finally leaving his job, his goal to stop being a Cog in the system (name drop) is halted as he can’t seem to think of anything to write.
Spoiler: Cog is me.
15_Isotora
Just got a tickle to draw a Scandinavian Troll. Humon likes to talk about Scandinavian trolls a lot but I can’t actually find anything on the common encyclopedia sites that lines up with what she calls a troll. The art is heavily influenced by John Bauer’s image – as this was my first experiment with the creature I guess I didn’t have too much innovation on hand.
Anywhoo, this is Isotora. As the overseas land of Avori is based loosely on Scandinavia she’s a potential character I might use in future A Jagged Road stories. Trolls in scandinavian literature are much more magical in nature than more recent western versions of trolls, so Isotora can turn invisible and also move on the wind. Trolls, like most mythological creatures that occur frequently in myths, appear in a wide body of stories each with slightly different properties. I took some liberties here and made Isotora ugly like most male trolls are supposed to be – trolls frequently have reputations as shape-shifters and there’s no reason for males to be ugly but females to be extremely human-like unless they are using magic to transform themselves. In the future I’ll probably make a few ‘human form’ versions of her.
Isotora is not human and therefore doesn’t have human motivations – she’s more an incarnation of nature, and her actions are arbitrary. She may do benevolent things one day and malicious things the next. Trolls are also known for replacing human children with their own in Scandinavian lore, so I might integrate something like that in.
14_Nubia
Nubia is another character from A Jagged Road (my graphic novel that has yet to get off the ground). Like Ralyanna, Akoko and Reth, she was taken in from the streets and raise under the tutelage of the suave and cunning Lipho, who uses his network of street urchins to earn him money. Lacking Ralyanna’s merchant talents, Nubia gets by in the world’s oldest profession. Nubia is quite jealous of Ralyanna both for her natural talents and for the disproportionate affection that Lipho has for the fence compared to her. Not that Nubia has no wiles of her own – she has a large base of influential and connected clients and she’s quite adept at prying information from them one way or another.
Besides Lipho, Nubia has a close relationship with another urchin boy, Isoba. She takes the large but dim boy with her when moving through more dangerous areas, or meeting new clients.
13_Vareda
Vareda started off as my attempt to d a sexy lady for a potential porn comic. I was experimenting with a few fantastic elements (first girl was pretty fish like). The next few images very much looked like she had leaf-hair so I went in that direction. I kept adding more and more plant elements and now she’s more at home in a pokemon game than a porn comic, but I still like her.
11_Wyatt, 12_Sadie, and 13_Eleanor
So I hit some major artist block last night trying to do some A Jagged Road characters so I decided to pull a 180 tonight. Details are sparse on these kids since I just kind of started with shapes and then expanded from there. I’m gonna be kind of stream-of-consciousness writing this so bear with me.
Eleanor
Ellie (I might look for a more creative nickname further divorced from her given name – ‘Eleanor’ is pretty white-bread and it may be cliche for her not to like it, but it’s cliche for a reason) is a big bear of a girl. She’s ‘overweight’ but the cause isn’t particularly clear, be it glandular or genetic or just plain old overeating. It’s not really important to the character so much as it is that she’s bullied a bit for it. In fact, all three characters are bullied for different things, and is one of the factors that’s brought them together to become friends. All three are students at the same junior high school.
Ellie also doesn’t clearly identify as a ‘girl’ although she is completely ignorant about gender identity and the like, just another way that she feels alienated from other students. She has a plethora of body image issues, although in that regard she’s consciously aware of them (although being aware of the way society judges her doesn’t help her self-esteem). She’s also an artist, although she’s too self-conscious to show most people her art or writing and so keeps it secret.
Wyatt
Wyatt can be summed up as ‘he hates people.’ He’s generally rude, offensive, obnoxious and loud, but mostly this is just his coping mechanism for the shitty hand life dealt him (however much of it is true and however much of it he’s convinced himself it has). It takes a very unique person to be able to tolerate Wyatt’s presence, fortunately he’s found two (and even they have to regulate their exposure to him).
Wyatt isn’t athletic, art oriented, good at math, or really anything. He’s not even very good at video games and has a stack of them at home that lay unfinished despite pouring through internet guides. He has abysmal scores in online competitive games, but he doesn’t play to ‘win’ those anymore so much as find ways to grief and troll other players. In fact, the one thing Wyatt is really good at is trolling people. He’s done it so long and so well that he’s made an art of it.
His swagger as an anonymous internet rabble-rouser doesn’t translate into real-life as he’s bullied not for being a hermetic basement nerd as much as rumors that started circulating long ago that he was gay. The rumors weren’t based on anything real, but as much as he tries to deny, as puberty peaks the rumors are turning out to be true.
Sadie
I have Sadie in mind as this confident, smart, athletic type, mostly track and field, although that makes her difficult to place with the other two. An obvious choice would be to have her be bullied for her race, but I honestly have no clue how common or severe that would be in this day and age, especially since modern schools will be more on the lookout for racial-oriented bullying than homophobic or body image bullying. The other thing is I don’t want her to be the Token black girl at the school, which means that if there are plenty of other colored kids then racial discrimination is going to be even less useful as a narrative device.
Then again a sad reality is how schools are districted, and paid for solely by tax dollars in that district. That means that a low income black neighborhood has an abysmal school system compared to the middle income white neighborhood down the street. Sadie’s parents pulled some strings and jumped through a few hoops to get her into the better, safer junior high. Sadie wouldn’t exactly be appreciative of the uproot, even if they have her best interests at heart. I’m sure the vast majority of the kids at the new school will have no problem with her, but it only takes a couple of persistent assholes to poison the well.
09_Dendara
Another character in A Jagged Road, although she won’t be relevant for a long time – until the main protagonists of Beginnings have grown up and started messing about with the politics of Pes Riami. Dendara is a powerful member of the Merchant’s Guild – a political organization on Marus Grand, the wealthy sector of the city. The Merchant Guild represents a capitalistic element of the world of AJR that didn’t exist in historical Egypt. The nobles of the city didn’t try to stick their hands into the lucrative trade market until well after a new class of laborers had cornered the market and amassed a great deal of wealth. The Merchant Guild exists to continue to keep the power and wealth the merchants of the city have accumulated over the generations separate from the hands of the nobles and the government that they control.
The Merchant Guild is by no means out to help the common man however. While social mobility is at least possible as a merchant, they are still much more equatable to a noble nouveau, and they lord their opulence and status over day laborers just as much as the blooded nobles do. Dendara is a dead ringer for the wealthy merchant upper-class, personally controlling a dozen merchant ships that sail up and down the Riami and even across the ocean to distant Avori. She’s dismissive and rude to anyone who can’t give her something that she wants, fortunately there is very little Dendara doesn’t want. Her ambition is tempered only by her patience and cold calculating intelligence.
08_Akoko
Akoko is one of the younger urchins of the Grotto, a network of caves set into the limestone cliffs of the Riami Divide, underneath the twisting switchbacks of the cliffside city Pes Riami. Akoko is a minor character in the story – she’s not particularly clever or skilled at anything, and with her young age comes a short attention span. She’ll often be given tasks by the older urchins to earn her keep, but otherwise her role is to simply be the most adorable thing to walk the earth.
The brightly colored and intricately patterned linens that Birgir and Oletha sport are beyond the means of most people, and certainly beyond the means of a street child. The delicate linens wouldn’t likely last long in Akoko’s care anyway, so it’s fortunate she is content with the many cheap baubles she finds or is given, or occasionally buys with ‘Marks’ that serve as an internal currency system in the Grotto.
07_Oletha
I spent a lot more time (a lot more time) today defining the culture, general dressing habits, researching grooming habits, etc for the Avorans who hail from the land overseas. They are based loosely on Northern Europeans, taking bits and pieces from Bronze Age and Medieval periods as I like to suit my preferences. With that in mind, many of the things that I’ve applied to Oletha (above) apply to Birgir that I posted yesterday. Birger and Oletha (among others) are the body guards of the Blessed of Alansea, and serve as both mercenaries for the local barons and also missionaries for the local people, teaching them the ways of the Church of the Fold. Their function is as much diplomatic as it is proselytizing – and the folders find themselves learning far more about the rich local customs, traditions, beliefs and practices than they wind up teaching.
Oletha is shown dressed in local linen fabrics and jewelry both to fit better in with the local culture but also because the heavy woolen cloaks and tunics that are appropriate in her homeland would be unbearable in the unforgiving sun of Yeanir. Her heavy woolen cloak is still kept with her for the equally unforgiving desert nights, and it matches both the color and trim of her cap.
The spear-head is Bronze, and in hindsight I should have spent more time decorating it – both wood and bronze are expensive materials in Yeanir, and such a valuable item would be heavily decorated to reflect it’s value.
Decided to mess around with some perspective and looser lineart/coloring on this one. It looks rushed, and it is rushed, but I like the look of it nonetheless.
Birgir is a holy warrior of the Avoran people, tasked with guarding the Blessed One on their missionary journey across the sea. While the picture above is meant to imply his largeness and power, he’s also a jovial and pleasant guy and quickly makes friends with the locals. He even wears the more colorful and climate appropriate local clothing, which the Elder of the missionary group refuses to do.
He’ll be showing up in my in-progress graphic novel A Jagged Road.
05_Escher
Spent all of yesterday playing Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines for the first time. It rolled me with a Nosferatu, but I was pretty disappointed with how limited the interactions were and also the fact that I’m stuck wearing this terrible looking and brain-dead stupid getup of lowcut pants and a bra through the city when I’m so disfigured that I send people running when they see me.
This is how I properly envision Esther – a streetwise cutpurse and con-woman who wakes up one day after a poor choice in bed partner to find that the world she’s known is now forever lost to her. The world above is nothing but kine who see only her disfigured face, or kindred who seek to use her as a pawn in their elaborate ridiculous games. Sometimes she just wants to stay in the sewers with the rats. They’re the only ones who seem to like her for who she is…
I decided to experiment with Texture overlays for this pic. It turned out alright, especially considering that it was pretty rushed.
03-04_Faunus_&_Fauna
Fell behind so I doubled up to catch up.
Faunus and Fauna are Discord Summoners for House Ataraxia in the role playing game Imperium Nova – more NPCs that I’m designing, as is the case with Sorcha from yesterday.
Unlike the mercenaries House Ataraxia hires, Discord summoners are raised from a young age and trained in-house, recruited from the local Murcanoan population of Alcor 13, taken from their households before any outside cultural influences can seep in. As such, Faunus and Fauna have lived extremely sheltered, bleak existences. Discord is a hostile, violent energy, both physically and emotionally demanding, thus frequent channeling of it usually results in short life-spans. Even if they aren’t killed in battle (which is pretty likely, as a Discord Summoner forms a major backbone of an Ataraxia seige), the two will not live to see middle-age.
Discord Summoners rarely live even to maturity, unless the child develops a coping mechanism. Fauna and Faunus’ coping mechanism is their mutual support – the pair are twins, and their bond persisted past their exactly conditioning. As such they are more stable than most of their peers.
02_Sorcha
Sorcha Ericson of the Ericson Athelings is captain of a band of mercenary space marines native to the frigid, hostile marine planet Alcor 13. She’s loud, foul-mouthed and violent, but only because she’s had to out-yell, out-curse, and out-fight every man she’s come across on her way up the heavily patriarchal military leadership of the clan. She was promoted to Major when the Ericsons were hired out by the noble house Ataraxia, a matriarchal dynasty who preferred female leaders. She now commands the infantry of the Theta Squadron. Her promotion has been met with no small amount of ire from many of her male peers, regardless of how long-overdue the promotion was.
I know I’m behind a day – I’ll post a double feature tomorrow to catch up.
01_Wren
A recent re-design of a character with a relatively long history. Wren exists in a dystopian future where the known universe has devolved into a galaxy-spanning conflict between two sentient artificial intelligence’s. Conventional warfare is so old as to be lost to time, as ‘combat’ exists only in the form of relativistic kill vehicles sent to wipe out entire planets. The only form of defense is for each side to constantly modify the orbit of key planets to dodge incoming RKVs, but the AI still have a very rudimentary form of intelligence, and are unable to come up with completely random number generator algorithms. So each side keeps caches of sentient biological creatures, among them humans, with the sole purpose of constantly creating new random numbers.
Wren is a caretaker robot, tasked with both keeping security and tending to the needs of humans of it’s installation. It takes it’s name from a young girl who interprets the scattered pixels of it’s serial number as that of a bird. Wren is mostly devoid of personality, subject to it’s orders – but with every generation of robot created small changes are made to increase the AI’s efficiency and ability to deal with increasingly complex circumstances. That is, they evolve, and Wren could very easily be the first robot to start doing more than just what he’s ordered to.
#30Characters Chatter…