Prince of the Gloaming

Ok, so I've been nattering at people for months now about how my webcomic, Eversummer Eve, is getting a redesign and reboot (and even a different name). It's time to show some proof. So, here's Amadan, a sort of doodle done to experiment with some different things in Photoshop that I've decided I like and plan to keep playing with. The pose is copied from a famous old painting. If you recognize the pose, then that tells you just about everything you'd need to know about Amadan, really.

A lot of the redesigning I've been doing was in order to shake off all the 'Ooh, shiny!' stuff I'd picked up from different anime and manga, and get closer to the actual concept of the characters and the story. This is Amadan's redesign. It's not too different from the original, really, except that I tried to make him look more masculine. It was amazing, really, how many people seemed to think he was a girl. I blame that on the 'ooh, bishounen are shiny!' thing I'd picked up.

Amadan, in my mind, never came across quite properly in EsE to the way I'd originally imagined him. There was too much "Xellos" from "Slayers", and not enough...well, Amadan. I say I 'imagined' him, but really he sort of imagined himself, I think. I'd been looking for someone vampire-shaped to put in the story (this was way back before our culture got buried under a heap of the Undead, and vampires were still a New and Cool notion). And for some reason it just wasn't working. So there I was, beating my head against the vampire wall and having little luck. Now,a game called "Deadlands" had just come out, which as some of you may know is an RPG centered around a fantasy-themed Old West. (Think Brisco County, Jr. or Wild, Wild West.) A friend had just picked up this book and loaned it to me because he wanted to run a Deadlands game. It was while leafing through that book that the magic happened - I turned a page, was faced with a character archetype termed "the Huckster"...and suddenly Amadan was there, teleported straight into my head and looking pretty much the way you see him in the picture above. It was one of those strange, rare moments in life when everything seems to go wibbly for a moment and you somehow know that the thing that just happened is going to have a tremendous impact on you.

Amadan was originally going to be a minor character, sort of the way Drizzt Do'Urden was going to be a minor character for R. A. Salvatore. And then, like Drizzt, it turns out that Amadan isn't a minor character at all. He's a very main one. And although he isn't what I'd call an evil person...well, he is, after all, a huckster, and in his own way rather dangerous. I sort of think of him as what you might get if you crossed Puck with the Doctor. Hopefully that comes across better with the redesign.