I’m back from almost two weeks of vacation and I feel great. we spent a few days camping here in Washington and then drove over to Idaho and spent another week at a lake cabin in Coeur D’Alene. I drew the first three Nightlight strips before I left but left the fourth for when I got home. I was struggling with the fourth comic because I wasn’t sure what I wanted the monsters in this world to look like. I knew I wanted them to come in all shapes and sizes but I was looking for some theme to tie them all together. When I left for my vacation I had no clue what that theme would be.
Our cabin in Coeur D’Alene had a little dock behind it and the kids loved jumping off it and swimming in the lake. I was sitting on the edge of the dock one day fishing while the kids swam around. I ended up pulling a fish right out from under the dock. I explained that the fish like to hide under the dock and the kids got a little spooked. All of a sudden they were wondering what lived in the darkness under this dock. Then I started to think...beds are kind of like docks. I ran inside and grabbed my sketchbook.
The monsters I started doodling had scales and gills. We caught a catfish that night and the boys thought it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen. We pulled out something with sharp fins like thorns on its back. Everything we reeled in just gave me more ideas. I decided the shadows under the bed were like dark, still water and I let that inform my monster designs.
Finally I asked my boys to each draw me a scary monster. Gabe’s was a snake-like thing with scales and gills.
Noah’s had four arms and sharp teeth.
I took the ideas I had about shadows like water, added in some of the stuff from my boys and cooked up the monster in today’s strip.
There’s just two more strips after this one and then we’ll be back to video games. If you can’t wait that long you might want to check out the strips we did for Bungie and the Taken King expansion. They came out during E3 and maybe you missed them. We created a comic for each of the new sub-classes and you can read all of them over on the official Taken King page.
-Gabe out
