Dimension Squad

Dimension Squad is the creative team of Eddie Dehais and Scotto Moore, creators of the webcomic Storm and Desire. Here we post sketches, notes, inspirations and other flights of fancy.

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Chapter 4 page 5 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 4 page 2 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 8 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 7 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 6 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 4 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 3 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 3 page 1 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Anjette in body armor - introduced in Chapter 3

from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 2 page 3 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Early design for Trick Start, back when he was a bit more mischievous of a character (during the DIMENSION SQUAD days). In STORM AND DESIRE, he’s more of a heavy hitter and gets a less whimsical treatment.

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When we got to Lorelei’s Prelude story, we went for a completely new direction for the character design. At that point in the story, Lorelei could manipulate “sprites” - our word for limited independent AIs that supported menial tasks throughout the Building. Lorelei in the Prelude is part machine: or as she describes herself, “Mostly organic anyway. Well partially organic for sure.” Eddie’s idea was that Lorelei’s hair could visibly swirl to help represent when she was communicating on the “mesh,” the largely invisible data network of the sprites.

Unlike Anjette’s Prelude story, which just seemed to immediately click, we wound up abandoning Lorelei’s first Prelude story after partially completing five pages. We regrouped, triaged several big problems with Scotto’s ambitious script (hint: depicting largely invisible settings is a bit challenging in a primarily visual medium), and started over from scratch with an all new script and all new artwork. It was costly from a raw hours perspective; but highly valuable from a craft perspective, giving us a better understanding of where our ambition and our skill actually met at the time. The new version of Lorelei’s Prelude gave us an extra page to spend in Lorelei’s flashback; killed the mesh and the sprites altogether; did a better job foreshadowing the importance of the Building; and did a better, quicker job of establishing Lorelei’s relationship with Agent Grey, which will pay off shortly in Storm and Desire.

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This was the very first page of the very first comic that Eddie & Scotto attempted to create together. It was called Dimension Squad, and in that story, Lorelei and Anjette were agents assigned to Earth. Lorelei is pictured above; we never got far enough into the story to have a good design for Anjette, because in the first issue of Dimension Squad, she is undercover and masquerades as several different minor characters before we ever would have seen her true look.

Although we abandoned this story completely in favor of Storm and Desire (abandoning this design for Lorelei in the process), we absolutely hope to bring that van back somehow.

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Our original design for Lorelei was very different, as you can see in the first image here. She played a different role in the story as well (to be fair, we started off telling a very different story overall). As it turned out, we had no idea that we had essentially stolen both her look and her function from the character of Aleph in the Global Frequency series by Warren Ellis, shown in the second image here (the series had a different artist with every issue, so I’m not sure who designed Aleph and who drew this particular version). We had no idea our design for Lorelei was so similar to Aleph because neither of us had read Global Frequency at that point!

Our entire story changed, all of our designs changed, etc, and we’re much happier with the Lorelei we have today. In the meantime, we used this older design as the basis for the design of Trickle, the bass player who gives Lorelei her phone number in Lorelei’s Prelude story.

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Chapter 1 page 12 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 1 page 11 process - from STORM AND DESIRE

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Chapter 1 page 10 process - from STORM AND DESIRE