Feb
03
My awesome Dad went through my gaming boxes in NZ and managed to track down the version of Isaac I made for the Deadlands RPG. Merci beaucoup, Papa! 😀
Deadlands – Isaac
This pic would have been made somewhere in the late ’90s or early 2000s. I was trying to mimic the colouring technique that Tetsuya Nomura used for the character designs in the “Final Fantasy VII” video game.
This version of Isaac is pretty close to the “In Ruins” version of Downtown. I’m glad I stuck with the Wild West theme. I think it suits his character.
Jan
29
Isaac “Downtown” Brown
Originally known as Isaac, he was a character designed for the Weird West RPG “Deadlands”. However, I only played that game once and he never got the chance to actually get used. I always liked his design though, so when I was thinking about including him in one of my series, I came up with his surname and his urban nickname.
Downtown’s looks were based on a combination of a couple of guys – Gary Dourdan’s character Christie from “Alien Resurrection” and Lajon Witherspoon from the band Sevendust. He’s also a bit of a mix of some of my friends, so I knew that Downtown would be great to include as Jake’s amigo.
Downtown’s clothes have remained in a Western-style for “In Ruins”. I thought it’d be interesting if he took the clothes from a predominantly White hero culture (at least in a Hollywood movie sense, in reality there were actually quite a lot of Black cowboys) and made them his own. Downtown is the owner of the Pontiac he and Jake travel in (it’s his version of Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse).
I thought that instead of a lone survivor trudging across the wasteland, it would be cool to make the “In Ruins” comic more like a buddy film. It allows the guys room to express thoughts and argue, but when the chips are down, they pull together. I think it’s worked out well in the comic and creates something different from the “Mad Max” films it’s obviously based on.
Unfortunately, I don’t have Isaac’s original character sheet with me in Europe (it’s somewhere in my gaming stuff in New Zealand). But, I do have another pic of Downtown from 2003 (Jake was still known as Mike in those days).
In Ruins – Downtown
There you go! A little backstory on the design of Downtown.
