Black Rabite

Hello, my ghastly entourage. And to those who would not consider themselves ghastly… try harder! It is Friday the 13th all over the world and yada-yada-superstitious-hogwash. In fact, it does not matter how your day has been so far. Because, finally, you may consider yourself lucky!

The last month provided quite a bit of a hassle and procrastination for me at the same time. Apart from work and university, StarCraft II held me in its Ultralisk-like claws, giving me the guilty pleasure of wasting away in front of the screen for a few hours again. Well, wasting away in front of the screen doing something else than writing texts or fooling around with illustration software. God, that screen is shiny. And yours will shine as well, as soon as you lay your eyes upon a new (well, old remade) episode of Murphy’s Law!

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, now available in my usual slow update cycle. In this episode, we follow Corporal Florian Pleathers as he tries to hit up Detective Debjit Murphy. Irony ensues.

Well, what can I tell you about this one? Redesigning Pleathers was something for which I needed a sketch first. Going free-hand in Illustrator is nice, but I fail quite a bit at recreating my personal style without some reference material. The mission was clear: New Pleathers should be even more loatheworthy than the original one. From Murphy’s point of view, anyway. Basically I went with a weak chin, huge bulbous forehead and one of those 90ies gel’d up short haircuts. You know the one. Further abuse testing of their social interaction will show whether that works out visually.

As for the ranks, I’ve had a few switcheroos after reading up on American Police Ranks. Not really informed any more on that topic now than I had been in the beginning, but immensely more confused, I demoted the Chief down to Captain, as I hadn’t really intended him to be in charge of anything more than the precinct. But more to that, later. I’ve also made Pleathers a Corporal, complete with two inverted chevrons on his shoulders. I just hope that’s even remotely correct…

Adding the blood proved to be a whole new challenge. Or rather, I avoided that challenge by downloading a number of blood splatter brushes for Photoshop and slapping them onto my Illustration after I had already exported it. So, what you have here is the first post-produced Murphy’s Law comic in history, ladies and gents! Well, okay, apart from those with a sepia tone slapped on. And those where I enhanced the contrast and colours a bit. The first post-produced one I did in Illustrator anyway.

I will let you bask in its gory glory until the next issue hits the digital shelves. In the meantime, I shall ponder whether “splorch” really is a good sound effect.

Jeebus, it’s hot these days. Doesn’t help I’m being treated to an extra dose of university over the weekend. Still, those precious little minutes in front of my oscillating fan I could squeeze out were put to good use: I remade the first page of Murphy’s Law from June 2008, which was pretty much alright as it was, but I really wanted to check how easy it is to create and pose Sweater-Murphy with his gun holster. Plus, it’s all part of the retconning progress.

I actually liked the hand-drawn art style in the old one better, as it is the most dynamical version of Murphy I’ve created up to this date. However, what it has in style, it lacks in detail and reproducability. So, while I don’t consider this illustration an improvement, but more of a sidegrade, it serves to level the comic’s style quite a bit. And I now have more templates to work with in the future.

But go ahead and make up your own mind.

Welcome back to Murphy’s Law, which last time took six months to go from the teaser-trailer to page one. I guess you could call that an improvement. In this episode, we follow Detective Debjit Murphy as he puts the “tool” in “multitool”!

Initially, I wanted to give the cola a more fiery design and call it Phoenix Cola, but apparently some New Zealandian do-gooders were one step ahead of me. Herbal cola that’s not actually, ahem, “herbal” but contains Ginko, eh? That burns on a wholly different level. The worst thing? I wanna drink one of those now. Damn you people.

Oh well. Guess the reference works this way, too, if not even better. Stay cool the best you can folks, until next time. And remember to drink the Wright stuff™!

Dear readers, viewers, listeners, tasters and other synesthetes. I took it upon me and sacrificed pretty much all of my Sunday recreating the teaser from back in 2008 with the new art style and made it… SHINY!

I guess you can now look upon it as the intro sequence. The prologue. The real starting point. Ladies and Gentlemen: Murphy’s Law is at hand!

Welcome to Murphy’s Law, where we follow the exploits of Indio-American all-purpose dective Debjit Murphy in the crime ridden city of Peaceful Hamlet. In this episode, we’re treated to… A TEASER TRAILER! BLAM-O!

All the work with Illustrator over the years finally made this one a breeze. Well almost. If you take the frustration out of trying to illustrate something and fill it with progressive success, it feels more like a breeze even if it takes hours. In summery heat. On a metal Mac. Oh well, at least I could do it outside in the grass. As long as the sun wouldn’t hit Steve’s patented über-reflective screen. Thanks man.

Technical difficulties aside, I retconned (link goes to TVtropes, enter at your own risk) Murphy into being of Indian (as in “from India”) descent now. I never could make up my mind what nationality he stems from, and how the name Murphy would make sense in that.
He started out as a sketch that I, at the time heavily influenced by the Ace Attorney series, based around the useless-but-amiable Detective Gumshoe. He ended up looking too much like the “grizzled detective” stereotype, so I reworked his hairdo to look a bit less conventional. That, again, looked so much better when I gave him dark skin. Following this completely arbitrary design progress, he appeared to simply be Afro-American at first. But that soon became unattractive as I did not want to invoke any Shaft-esque cop story that would border on Blaxploitation (crap, I did it again). Giving him the project name “Lavernious Murphy” didn’t help much either.
I then thought about where else he could be from, conceding with “oh what the hell, how about the Middle-East”. And there was Darius Murphy, of Iranian descent, whose parents came to the states and got a new name. Or grandparents. Or his mother married an American. As you can see, that backstory felt incredibly uncomfortable to form.
In the final design stages of the last few weeks, I shifted his skin colour a bit more towards Auburn, and bam, suddenly he had an Indio-Irish heritage… you may get a look at that scrambled up genealogy later. Soon as I have it figured out myself. All he needed now was something of a more stereotypical name. Thankfully, the internet is full of creative ways to name your baby boys, even in Hindi. He ended up with the name Debjit, which not only sounds like some sort of Irish curse and thus goes nicely with Murphy, but apparently also means “one who has conquered the gods”.

Oh, have I got plans for you, Murphy! Stay tuned for more of my Redesign Retcon Rampage.