Marlon, from the same universe as Akira and Dylan, same village thing as Akira.  

The most Marlon Looking image of him is actually in my friend’s possession, it was a gift I made for her back in the day and ended up capturing how we saw him better than his initial drawing - in the center here - just because he’d had time to BE something rather than just being kind of conjured up from parts like the first one.  The other two are from a few years later, and the pencil one is closer to how he felt, but both are also from a weird detour we took in character, so I don’t even know.  I could explain it, but it’s a hot mess.  I know only that he wouldn’t have been able to have that nose prior to 2005 according to my anime marinated brain at the time. 

I also talked a little about Marlon when I first posted him, so I won’t put you through any of that business again.  It’s just been cool to see all these people with their oldschool selves.  

Here’s Dylan, who is from the same story/universe as Akira, though Dylan lives in the river society there and Akira in the mountain one.   This whole saga came from a camping trip in 2001, and, for some reason, I decided to draw Dylan every single year on the anniversary on his creation.  So I have a very strange progression of this kid from 2001 to 2007, when I stopped just because I probably forgot, I dunno.  His first image is in the top left, and next to that is 2003, which is both his best year in terms of how he looked and the image that felt the most like him when I looked back through everything.  He’s always felt kind of childish and fun - he liked pretending to be a rock star in a universe that by all accounts should not even have them, so I don’t know what we’ll do with that if we decide to make tweaks to this - so the newest drawing is a bit impish in the face, haha.  

He also got a re-allocation of his wardrobe.  He’s been in this weird red and black thing for all these years that definitely was inspired by the same stuff that brought about Euro, but it stopped making sense ages ago, so now he’s angled more Ancient Egyptian with the kind of knee length kilt approach rather than like, a weird strip of leather chained to his chest because the person who created him wasn’t confident in their bare chest drawing abilities. 

Akira, who I’ve talked about a little when I first posted the new image.  From another story made with the same friend I did all this vampire business with. 

The image on the bottom in profile is the first one and the only one I ever felt was successful in looking like the character. The current one looks like the right feeling now too, though I think I put too much color in the skin, haha.  

I like Akira more as a little weird and off putting and threatening looking rather than the soft and pretty from the upper old images, but Akira was a favorite for a while, which meant eventually cutesy lovey romancey nonsense had to happen, regardless of character.  

There was a lot more of Akira than I remember, haha.  

Anyway, as with all the others, I went for the vibe and the visual more strongly associated with the character for me, which was that original drawing on the bottom.  Like seeing old friends again, you know?

Remember when I said the theme was making people more monstrous

This is Corinth, he’s child #3 of Silvana and Snake Alien Man and he’s gone from sad pathetic super innocent and fragile anime boy to being a revivified corpse with awkward mannerisms and random violent impulses when near people he can eat, so Improvement. 

I cannot, cannot, Can Not, stress how many pictures of Corinth exist in which he is watching over his fucking alien vampire hybrid family as a damn angel.  It’s The Worst, I leafed through them a week or two ago and wanted to perish myself.  I have included none of them here and cheated instead with the colored image from 2005 instead of more raw Actively Doing This energy from 1999-2002 because uuuugh

Anyway, Corinth was sort of the first exploration of ‘lol, wow, our species were not meant to have children, huh,’ that I did (his older sister Lydia would also be a later victim of this, but she stayed healthier longer).  He just was weak and a bit frail and not as strong as he should have been, all that kind of thing.  Back in the day, I think I just wanted sad pretty and fluffy.  And I think I may have intended him just to always be slightly broken and wise and beautiful (he was the one with most resemblance to Silvana) or something, but even back then I decided fuck that, Imma kill him.  

And so he was just Dead for years, both inside the story and out here in real life ‘what are we doing with this?’ land.  And this put a dent in Silvana’s ability to do other things, she was just obsessed with the loss.  I have a picture of her cradling Corinth’s bones while a more recent baby sits nearby, it was a big deal.  

But it’s vampires and space aliens and magic and shit, so even if you are mummified remains, you know how it is, you have a shot.   Things involving blood and his parents’ research and contributions from other even weirder supernatural species were involved and rebuilt Corinth from bones up.   But there’s consequences for being like 90% alive, so while he’s steadier and stronger now, he’s kind of a little dried out looking and he’s never not hungry.  He just requires a constant energy input to keep Being and he’s definitely attacked some human/mortal spouses of relatives.  He talks strangely, expressions and things just kind of malfunction occasionally.  Vision definitely did not improve from pre-death.   He’s still very bright and arguably the kindest of the children, but he’s dangerous. 

So uh, yeah, I like him a lot more now, hahaha.  

Color scheme-wise, he was always in like the flowy white and blue pure pretty anime boy bullshit, so I went with greens, browns, and gold instead.  Both being a little bit dead and his father’s green blood contribute to his overall coloring.   

Except for the red jewel.  All of Silvana’s children have a red jewel.  It’s just how it is.

This is Euro, and he’s one of those cases where the old anime look was both repulsive and iconic to me and it was hard to reconcile.    I have so many things no one gives a shit about to say about this guy, damn. 

Euro is Silvana’s second child with the giant snake alien man, who has ‘genetically kind of fucked up for his species’ red hair.  Normal hair colors for that species is black, which was how I justified Lydia, who is Euro’s older sister mostly because I was 13 and I said so.  They’re all a big stack of un-aging supernatural alien creatures and some shit, so they’re all just going about their business living forever young and what not, hence no one bothering to look proportionally aged at this point in things.  

Anyway, Euro was my favorite gothy trash disaster character back in the day, definitely eclipsing my prior enjoyment of his sister, and he got a significantly large amount of character ‘up-time’ in comparison to many of my characters, not just his sister.   Lydia was something I enjoyed in my own time and in my own brain, but Euro interacted with the whole story, which was a collaboration with my friend.  So he often feels like the real oldest child to us, because Lydia was just some aesthetic fun I was having and hadn’t reconciled with the actual narrative.  Anyway, whatever, we fixed that. 

Euro was highly influenced by the gothy dress up dolls I was downloading at the time, and one of the images I included here is the one I actually made of him.  His look is both ridiculous and appealing in a revealing 2002 Hot Topic kind of way.   Most of the time in current visions of the thing, he’s wearing a lot of extravagantly fancy nonsense, and the insertion of some lace inside the bell sleeves is kind of a call to that, but in my head, he always looks like some hazy version of the full body thing from 2002.  Part of his character is enjoying a lot of over the top or expensive historically gothy bitch fashion, so this isn’t totally out of line, haha.  And so, since I knew I was going to have to change the other largest thing about him, I let the outfit stay with the minorest of adjustments.  

Because the palm tree hair.   It’s like an iconic shape for him.   We made stick figure drawings making fun of our own overdramatic plots and Euro was so easily just like palm tree shape with a pony tail that, even if it’s embarrassing to look at and not really in line with the look I was going for, I was looking for a way to translate it.  I ended up with these layers in this hair, and length he can definitely still pony tail, which I pulled a piece forward for in this drawing.  Because I couldn’t draw a piece of it just floating out from behind him like I used to, haha.  

dress like the goth bitch you desperately wanted to be when you were 13 and then let all the characters you made then stay that way too  

This is Angkor, and also a mess.  

The first drawing of him ever was the pencil black and white, and the first colored one was the one in the top left, where I fucked up my own design idea and gave him a long turtleneck thing under the long tunic shirt and random vest.  I was making this shit up on the fly on the floor of my bedroom at my mom’s house one weekend so the general approach was just like ‘make lines until it looks like clothes.  Coloring and defining what the hell is going on is later you’s problem.’

Anyway, the schtick is that he’s a Dark Phoenix and he had revealed a human form in order to deliver some news from this whole population of phoenixes that exists in one of the worlds connected to this story.    There was an absolute Mountain of Angsty Bullshit to go with him, I cannot stress this enough.  His feathers were sort of ‘stored’ in the black bands around parts of his body - forehead, neck, wrists, ankles as though magically condensed into tattoos or something.   He also had one feather on his head that was like the last one had to keep out at all times or else Something, I don’t know.  Maybe it was like a fuckinig zipper pull for all the others.  I say this as though his current look doesn’t echo it.  

BUT, speaking of his current look, I decided I wanted to change what Angkor looked like back in 2011 or so, because he was too human to me and also dressed like a weird ranch hand.   So I ditched the wings on his back in people form, opting instead for a sliding scale of usage of his arms for wing purposes.  The bands are still there though they’re larger and kind of like they’re overstuffed even in the closest he gets to looking like people.   I put more feather-y shapes and chunks in his hair, like it’s kind of a hybrid mess rather than just one random feather sticking out.   He also got a weird greyish skin tone. 

As ridiculous as the original look was, I still have a strong association for this character with that color scheme, so when making this I took most of the 2011/2012 redo and then I borrowed the maroon from the useless vest of the original for the color of his clothing now.  Somewhere in 2012-ish exists a drawing where I put a proper shirt on him, but I’m not even sure he needs one, so I didn’t try real hard to track it down and just did this.  

One of the themes I’ve been finding is making everyone a little more monstrous, haha. 

Silvana was my vampire queen back in the day (though I guess she still is now), and I drew her extremely frequently.  She, like everyone else, got her turn in a long fluttery white dress thanks to Sailor Moon, but red was always her main thing.  I drew a lot of her out of character and behaving more like a teenager than a several century old last surviving member of her species, but I was, in fact, a teenager, so, you know.  

She started life with this swiped up curl hair thing, and while I later found a way to make that look both more possible and more like hair, her hair not defying gravity has been more the norm.  

I did a lot of spiders and bats on her the first time around, because ~vampire, you guys~, though those are gone now.  She has kept the red pendant from the left, and the pearls in the big V hair have stuck around and just been draped everywhere like I’m fucking decorating a cake.   She lives in a magical ocean palace, so there.  

I wanted to put her Not in full on red this time, mostly so her pendant would stand out, so she’s got a cream gold going on instead, sort of unintentionally calling back to fluffy white dress time.  It’s some kind of full circle, though now I’ve intentionally styled her to look more properly like an elegant royal thing and not just wearing a red maxi dress or Sailor Moon Princess PJs. 

She married a guy who was a giant half snake man from space and has a bunch of vampire snake alien children she’s currently trying to use to rebuild her species.  Her husband has green blood, and since he’s kind of her primary source of blood, there’s a green tinge to her skin now.  

There’s a couple wild sentences for you. 

Lydia was one of my favorites in 1999, but just sort of aesthetically.  Without getting excruciatingly into lore and conventions of the story she was involved with, I just made her up and decided she was two characters’ daughter without any of it really making sense.  It’s definitely been retrofitted to make sense since, but at the time it was just like, ‘I want a black haired vampire with Two Different Colored Eyes!, and I’ll name her LYDIA, because that’s the gothest name I know thanks to the Beetlejuice cartoon!’, so while I drew her freakishly often, she did nothing within the story she was allegedly part of.   This made her very suited to ‘draw whatever the fuck you want, you don’t know what personality she has so everything is in character’ that was happening thanks to my previously mentioned Sailor Moon infection.  

She’s more something I’m interested now, as she looks more like some kind of bog witch instead of some fusion of Sailor Moon and whatever I thought was badass at the time.   That picture of her on the rose-covered rock wall was the one that has stuck with me longest, though, and so the look I gave her in the latest drawing was based on that and adjusted for current story situations.  Her other most popular looks were in a simple literal Crayola green dress and whatever action hero kind of business is happening in the bottom left.   She’s neither prettily sitting on rose walls nor Lara Croft nowadays, she’s just kind of unstable and messy. 

Here’s my girl Lumina.   You’ve seen this new drawing before, but she was very easy to put together since I loved drawing her back in the day and there was ample stuff to compare to.  

She’s been around since ‘99 (the top left is my first drawing of her) and she’s been a consistent part of my original character adventures since then.  The left side drawings are from 99-02.  Lumina suffered from ‘I like Sailor Moon’ disease as much as literally everyone else I drew all that time ago in that they all looked mystical and flowy and beautiful and serene even if they weren’t serene and flowy characters.   Her latest drawing is far closer to her kind of devious wacky nosy personality and I included the yellow outfit one because it was a rare closer lean toward what she was really like even back then.  

Her concept was always that she was a dragon lady who did magic, and this has definitely stayed, though I think now it’s more emphasized than it used to be.  Before, it was just kind of like and here’s a weird green elf lady (though the grinning picture gave her teeth she was due!), and now I’ve tried to give her some more integration of elements.  The purple hair now has echoes on her extremities, she’s got some larger more lizard claw kind of hands.   I put her back in something more resembling her original colors, the kind of pinkish beige-y whatever, but, you know, an option that wasn’t extremely fluffy snow queen.  I imagine that kind of color is involved in her proper dragon shape somehow anyway, so she’d favor it in clothing.  

It’s always really something taking all these very anime looking old characters who I have this long standing emotional attachment to and making them look Not Anime.  In some cases, I have a clear image of what they should look like instead and what I makes comes out like, ‘Oh, there you are! <3′, but in others, it’s really hard for me to make something new that feels like the old character without the conventions of the anime and manga vibe.  For some characters, it’s easy to dismiss as something I really dislike but for others the old look is like a fond old friend and it’s hard to reconcile it with the things I have happening now.  A lot of what I’ve been doing with these is trying to preserve the feeling of the characters, because the emotional attachment and recognition in the characters is equally important to me as making them look nicer, or make more sense, or be more coherent, or whatever.