Today I thought I’d share a little on how I come up with many of the alien beings that inhabit the universe of Brute and co.
I’ve shared previously that some of the near-Earth species have visited the planet at some point and often caused mythological legends to be born. This in part dictated the look of ‘bovines’ and ‘mermaid-eels’ to use the human colloquial names, and we’ll discover some other local races that look awfully familiar.

Officer Lullumon (first seen in ‘Buyer’s Remorse’ Brute #0 part 2) is a tri-symmetrical being with three identical sides.

However, going deeper into the galaxy, things become ever more alien to human life. One tenant I have for myself is that there is no logical reason why all intelligent lifeforms would be humanoid. Which is an immense crutch we see in pretty-much all space-sagas from Buck Rogers through to Guardians of the Galaxy (even in comic form). Almost all alien life in these, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc, are two armed, two legged, flesh covered beings of approximate human height. Ridiculous!! Albeit practical for actors or even computer models.
But if look at life on Earth, out of the millions of lifeforms on Earth, how many are truly bipedal? Humans, kangaroos, a handful of flightless birds, and ummm…. Right? How many (land dwellers) are covered in flesh? Humans, elephants, uh, naked mole rats, and uh….. See? The human design is a real exception, and in many ways not a very practical one. So aside from some of my earliest designs, I don’t make any of my races bipedal, unless there’s a good evolutionary reason, or merely covered in flesh and not fur, feathers, quills, scales, or something else, unless there’s a reason they would be. They aren’t 6′ tall either, generally, although for the sake of my artist’s sanity, I try not to have too many exceptionally large or small races.
So how do I come up with them? I’ll often start with a simple science fact and ‘what if?’ Such as; life on Earth is all bi-symmetrical. You can cut virtually any Earth life in half in a way that’ll give you two near identical sides. But what if early life what tri-symmetrical? Or not symmetrical at all? How could they evolve into intelligent life? In Issue #1 you’ll see examples of both.
Or what if they had no bone structure? How could it exist in a way that still allowed for the capacity to use and create tools? You’ll see examples of that too.
Once Issue #1 comes out (not long now!) I’ll get into specifics on some of these alien races we’ll discover.