A glimpse in the crystal ball

Now that Leo, Nikos and I are hitting our stride with the first issues of Mirabilis season two, there's a daily temptation to show what we're working on. The spring is here, the comet looms large in the sky, and magic isn't hiding in the shadows anymore. That means lots of spectacular locations and fabulous new characters. At the same time, I don't want to spoil the fun by showing too much too soon. It's the biggest dilemma since Sir Lancelot was dying to tell his best pal about the hot chick he'd just been banging.

As an entire page of the next issue has appeared on Facebook, I guess it's okay to trot out one little glimpse here. I say "trot out" mainly because of two of our new characters. That's Withers on the left and, on the right, Cannonbone. The fellow in the middle is an old acquaintance from Mirabilis: Winter, last seen climbing a rope into the wild blue yonder, while the lady shall remain anonymous for now.

In comics and movies it's pretty hard to make a centaur character like Withers work. The hindquarters are out of scale for everybody else in the scene, as you'll know if you've seen The Philosopher's Stone or The Lightning Thief, so I'm going to do a post on how we designed Withers with that in mind. But that's for another day.

Here you can see how our art process works from my thumbnails (below) to Leo's pencils (above). I obviously drew the girl on a whole other level from the other three. She's actually supposed to be sitting in front of them, not (as in my sketch) waist-deep in the ground. Luckily I have Leo to fix my mistakes!