Category: web comic

John Dee

Scholar, inventor, tinkerer, alchemist, magician, occultist, mathematician…John Dee spoke Latin and Greek, studied the weather—was there anything he didn’t do? Dee would have been in his twenties at the time of this story, but I’m making him just a little bit older. He’s attached to English Royal Intelligence ( he certainly was in real life). He will be the Tudor version of Q, Ian Fleming’s character in the James Bond stories, who comes up with the fancy weapons and inventions for His Majesty’s intelligence agents.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dee

Schlaab

Here’s a sketch of Schlaab, the 16th-century evil supervillain who heads up the Consortium, a cabal of fabulously wealthy financiers. Of course he owns a fluffy white cat. Schlaab intends to control the kingdoms that make up Europe by overthrowing their kings and putting himself in charge. Instead of military warfare, the Consortium will collapse each kingdom’s barter economy. He’ll buy up food at harvest-time and pay in cash, which will undermine the feudal system. Too little food, too much worthless money—pretty soon everybody will have to eat bugs. The Consortium then sells the food back at an inflated price—which includes land and power. Could his diabolical plan work?

England is the holdout. Their Magna Carta has made English people somewhat free of feudalism. Schlaab needs to assign an ambitious Consortium member—Doctor Johanne Faustus—to manage the downfall of England’s royal family.

The abominable Nine Circles

Elizabeth’s nemesis, Doctor Faustus, needs to get to sea so he can capture her. He’s without any kind of boat, so the demon Mephistopheles summons the abominable carack Nine Circles from the briny deep. Here’s my sketch. Of course, she will be crewed by devils.

More Elizabethan sea dog sketches

These aren’t exaggerated, I drew them straight from reference. I gotta say, some of these costumes look weird. Especially the guy with the huge pantaloons—how did he get any work done? Doesn’t he need to go aloft and climb around on the spars and adjust rigging once in a while? The guy with a cape slung over his shoulder is wearing what they call ‘slops’—big, loose cargo shorts made out of some durable linen or wool. That seems like a more sensible choice for pants.

Master Abbot character design

Here’s the pirate captain, Master Abbot. Side note: ship captains were called ‘masters’ back in those days.

The story called for a malevolent pirate captain, but this guy’s backstory took on a life of its own. Abbot became a way to point up the social upheaval of the time. He was the abbot of a monastery. That changed when King Henry VIII had a disagreement with the pope, declared the Church of England his kingdom’s new Christianity and dissolved the old Catholic monasteries. Abbot’s world was shattered. He decided to wage war on all mankind; he became a pirate.

Abbot is partially inspired by Captain Ahab who was obsessed with Moby Dick, the great white whale. Another inspiration is John Charity Spring, the demented Latin-master-turned-slave-ship-captain from the Flashman novels. I’m thinking about having Abbot speak in Latin Bible verses (King Henry replaced the vulgate Latin bibles with English ones).

I’m still fiddling with this design. He may be too skinny. I need to fix some drawing errors.

John Broadbeam

Here’s a rough sketch of a rough character—John Broadbeam, one of the pirates aboard Gloriana. He’s not a historical character; I made him up. Broadbeam will help Elizabeth escape England. I’d originally thought to cast Brian Blessed for this role. Broadbeam is a big, hearty character. As I’m drawing the storyboard, though, I realize a polyglot crew would be accurate even back in the mid-1500s. Beside that, I need a little visual variety. I can’t have all the big, hairy guys looking like Henry VIII.

So John Broadbeam is black. Should he be English-born or from North Africa?

Here’s Brian Blessed, skip to the 1:00 mark.

I don’t have a particular actor in mind for Broadbeam now. Maybe I’ll just keep drawing and get a feel for him.

Consortium boardroom sketch

As I mentioned earlier, I added to GLORIANA’s story: an evil cabal of wealthy financiers who want to take over the kingdoms of 16th -century Europe. Most of the architecture in Elizabeth’s world is Tudor-style. To differentiate the world of these bad guys, their architecture will be mediaeval Gothic. This is a sketch I did to help me visualize their world. Gothic looks heavier and more imposing than other styles.

If, like me, you’d been a student of art teacher Rolly Ivers at Cicero High School back in the 1970s, you’d have been given an introduction to architectural history. It was one of his passions. We all had 3-ring binders full of the mimeographed handouts he painstakingly assembled. I’ll always be grateful Rolly shared that with us. Because I have that foundation, I can whip out a sketch like this even before doing a bunch of research. Of course, I’ll look up Gothic interiors to amplify and fine-tune what I started here. But having a well of images in my head helps me to work efficiently.

Katherine Ashley

Henry VIII banished his daughter, Elizabeth, from court. I can’t discover why, except that Elizabeth did something to upset him or they had an argument. I don’t know if she were under house arrest or sent away. For my plot, I need Elizabeth to be banished to somewhere so bad guys can kidnap her.

In history, in real life, Katherine Ashley was Elizabeth’s governess. I decided to monkey with the truth and make Kat the headmistress of a school for young ladies, say half-a-day’s ride from Hampton. Now I have a destination for Elizabeth.

https://thetudorenthusiast.weebly.com/blog/the-life-and-death-of-kat-ashley
https://www.sparknotes.com/biography/elizabeth/section1/