John Dee is the alchemist/inventor who supplies the king’s intelligence agents with their gadgets. I need some transportation for him—he rides out to see the big climactic battle of our story. The wagon is small, but I think I need to add a horse.
Here’s some character design. Early in our story, the devil Mephistopheles convinces Dr Faustus to trade his soul for worldly riches and power. For instance, Faustus wants to eliminate the Tudor family so he can take over England. How will Mephistopheles make that happen?
Even the Devil has limits. Mephistopheles can’t kill people—instead, he lures them to their own destruction. He tempts them. His big weapon is Sin—the Seven Deadly Sins.
Here are sketches for Rage and Lust. Lust was tricky because I don’t want to make this comic book X-rated. What I drew here is a variation of the most lustful kids’ cartoon character I can think of: Pepe LePew.
After her long walk to the seaside town of Portsmouth, Lady Elizabeth finds a place to sit down in a sailor’s tavern. Here are rough sketches I drew to get the feel of the place. The tavern needs to be in town but a little apart from other buildings. It needs to be near to the sea. I’ll draw more. There’s a spectacular barroom brawl I will stage, so the floor plan needs to be worked out.
I should come up with a name for it, like ‘The Salty Dog’ or ‘The King’s Arms.’ I’m working on a crowd-funding page. Maybe naming rights to the tavern will be an incentive.
Lady Elizabeth escapes her kidnapers and makes her way to Portsmouth on the southern shore of England. I continue world-building—here are sketches of a mediaeval town gate and an old street (neither of them are Portsmouth, actually). I’m mimicking on a very small scale what animation studios do. I want to have assembled sketches of all the locations and backgrounds I need before drawing the comic.
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.
I don’t have a name for this guy yet. He’s the captain or master of the French Carraquon.
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.
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.
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.
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.
glorianacomic 