Tag: pirate

Les Matelots

French sailors, that is.

England under King Henry VIII was having a back-and-forth war with the French. He raided France, so France decided to raid England. They were trying to steal territory from each other. Back in those days land equaled wealth. The Industrial Revolution was still a few centuries away, so most trade was in agricultural goods—produce and livestock, lumber. You need land for all that.

This is a pirate tale, so our heroine, Elizabeth, will run into the French navy around Page 54. Here are sketches of French sailors who serve aboard the Carraquon. In Elizabeth’s day, navies didn’t provide uniforms for their sailors. I should probably have drawn them with bare feet, as they would have been aboard ship. Many sailors wore big, wide-legged trousers called slops.

Thumbnail sketches

The GLORIANA manuscript is written. You’ve seen that I’ve been designing the characters (I think I got almost all of them now). The manuscript needs to turn into a graphic novel—that means lots of pictures. I need to map out how I’ll tell this story visually. So I start with thumbnail sketches. Little rough drawings—no frills, half-size—whose job is to give me a starting point for drawing the tight sketches.

W’s Office and Mistress Hapenny

A couple of loose sketches. I’m trying to create a little world here. The climax of GLORIANA will be a showdown between the English and French navies on a body of water called the Solent. Leading up to the battle, Henry VIII will receive info about the French through his Royal Intelligence service. You met Sir Thomas Wriothesley in the last post. Here’s a sketch of his office. I’m taking a lot of liberties with Sir Thomas, so out of decent respect for his memory I’m calling him simply ‘W.’

Here’s a sketch of W’s secretary, Mistress Hapenny. Her duties include managing the homing pigeons used to communicate with the service’s field agents. In Tudor days, ‘mistress’ meant ‘lady of the house.’

Thomas Wriothesley

More character design! Rough sketches for Sir Thomas Wriothesley, Lord Chancellor who runs Henry VIII’s intelligence service. When Elizabeth goes missing, Henry taps Wriothesley to find her. Wriothesley (“Call me Risley”), or Sir Thomas, or W. In real life, he dressed kind of flamboyantly (he’s sporting a leopard-print scarf in his painting—I did his caricature here. For me, I want him to look more business-like. I designed him without much reference to his portrait. The modern men’s business suit would aptly tell us about his character but of course I can’t dress him like that. Still, I want him to be dressed somberly. Also, his body type in my sketches is beefier than Wriothesley’s own. I want him to look like a boss. The American actor Ed Asner often played bosses so his body type was my starting point.

The sketch with W leaning on his desk seems a little too aggressive. W’s character is trying to run an intelligence agency staffed with at least one loose-cannon field agent. He should be a steadying figure. His character is patient and efficient in the face of chaos. The third and fourth sketches are closer to what I’m after. I think the fourth sketch is the winner.

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.