There’s a few exciting things to announce this week re: Brute so here goes:
I’ve revised the site so everyone can now easily read the first few pages of each Brute story (before deciding if you want to go ahead and grab it). See ‘Read’ in the menu.
I’ve added a wiki section, which has replaced our character listings. It looks pretty much the same at the moment but I’ll be adding to it regularly and it’ll cross-link between the entries. So if you want to know more about a character’s species or where they’re from, you’ll be able to easily. So if you like to be in the know about that sort of thing, check-back often.
Finished art is progressing well and the first few pages of colored art are also in and look amazing – but don’t take my word for it. Check it out! Thanks for our amazing art team of Owen and Brooke!
Very excited to announce our team has gotten a little bigger! Introducing our new colorist: Brooke Newhart!
Brooke is a 23 year old from North Carolina. She loves cats (thankfully our book features one) and gardening. She’s been painting for 8 years and when she’s not coloring for Brute, she’s working on illustrations for a book.
We look forward to working with Brooke to make Brute #1 the best it can be and hopefully, many more issues beyond that.
Of course, no introduction would be complete with an example of her work. This is just a mock-up page to get a handle on character colours and overall look for the book and not necessarily representative of final product. Still, looks awesome. Can’t wait to share more with you.
As we approach the launch of Brute #1 – the proper launch of the series about of a bunch of misfit galaxy bounty hunters, the question that is bound to arise is, ‘Why Rose?’
Issue #1 is the origin story of Rosita Kahn, aka, Rose, best buddy and well, maybe just a little bit more, to our hero Brute. So if it’s Brute’s comic, why wouldn’t we start with his origin story? The simple answer – it just didn’t work.
I wrote and re-wrote that story, so many times, in so many ways, and believe me, it’s a story that must to told, but there were some fundamental limitations to starting there.
First off, Brute may look like a familiar teddy bear, but he’s actually an alien, from the planet Bru. A virtual paradise of peace and fun loving beings like Brute. Uh, wait… what? How do you get a rage-filled miscreant like Brute from such a place? You’ll see…. But the trouble is, it’s alien. Then he meets Captain Jerrreecko, another alien and things just get even more alien from there. It’s dropping our readers into the deep-end of our fantasy-verse and then going deeper without coming up for air. It’s just hard to be too invested in the characters or story when everything is strange and alien. Which leads to the second major issue.
Brute starts off as even a more rage-filled jerk than when Rose meets him. While he’s likable, he’s not endearing enough to carry the reader through the story – at least not until you know how we comes out years later and you can overlook some of his earlier roughness.
While Brute may be the star of the series, Rose is both the heart of the team, and the relatable avatar for the reader. She acts as their eyes into this fantastic strange universe where humans are merely a curiosity and not a player in galactic affairs. Rose’s origin is immediately relatable and she’s an endearing character that you can’t help but root for. You want to see how she survives all the low blows the galaxy keeps throwing at her.
If you’ve read Brute #0 you’ll know she’s become a force to be reckoned with in her own right, now you’ll learn how she became that way. And don’t worry, Brute definitely had a hand in that.
Enjoy this exclusive sneak peek at Brute Issue #1!
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.
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.
I know how important it is to post regularly, but I’ve been struggling with what to say to engage my readers when there’s not much going while art gets completed on the latest issue of Brute (more on that below). Thankfully my new Facebook friend – Michael Penick author of Simon Brizdale and the Gauntlet of Kings, gave me some sage advice. That my own journey, vision, and goals, could be every bit as interesting as the fictional ones I’m writing about (providing they’re presented in an entertaining way). So each post, I’ll share a little bit on who I am and my journey as I update you on the progress of Brute.
I just bought a new house, in Barrie, Ontario, Canada, about an hour north of Toronto and moved in almost a month ago. Now that we’re settled in, I was having a delicious apple crisp and cup of Nespresso, admiring the gorgeous view from our dining room and reflecting on how utterly happy I was with the current trajectory of my life. From my beautiful and talented wife, to writing Brute, to being able to enjoy such moments in such splendor, everything is, or is on route to be, wonderful.
And then I had that nagging sense of what’s going to go wrong? What disaster is life going to throw at me to shatter this illusion of happiness? Is this where the rollercoaster starts peaking and it’s all downhill and crazy roundabouts from here? Can you relate? If you’ve had this experience share below.
Such thoughts, I had to remind myself, are foolhardy. Yes, perhaps, this was the best life has ever been, for me, but my neighbour has lived here for 8 years, so to him, this view, this peacefulness, this ‘grandeur’ of living is all just everyday, commonplace, baseline, what is. He’s also happily (I assume) married and seems to love his job, his kids, his dog. He’s certainly not wondering when it’s going to fall apart. He’s probably wondering how to make it even better.
That’s certainly a theme in Brute – that how we perceive life, largely defines how we experience it. And how we experience it largely defines how we perceive it. It’s not until we can step outside our box, that we can we see new (to us), equally valid ways of living. But what happens when your entire reality is transformed and your suddenly thrust into an alien world, all alone, with no basis of how this new life should even be?
We’ll find out soon in Issue #1 of Brute – when a young Rose Kahn finds herself abandoned on a space station with no means on ever getting home and no one to help her except for a strange being known as ‘Brute’.