oh also also, was nail always gonna be offspring of aeschylus? i was thinking about the amount of eyes nail usually has. like is there a character reason he doesnt typically have all those eyes or was that bc the design existed b4 the lore?
Well, he does have the eye pattern - he just typically keeps those eyes closed! Mostly because drawing that many eyes on a face at all times is like.. Actually kinda hard and tedious and Nail already has a lot of other details that I’ve had to simplify over the years. Since he’s a character that was supposed to be specialized in strength, having multiple eyes visible on his face actually felt a bit like.. Redundant. He already has many eyes on other parts of his body, including two on each feet. Technically, in his original queen form during his debut in the comic on page 3887 (posted on Jul 4th, 2017) - he had 16 eyes total! (4 total on his feet, 1 on his tail, 1 on the back of his neck, 1 large eye on his chest, 1 eye on each palm of his hand..) to also add the 7 eyes on his face.. Yeah. it’s a lot of eyes.
That being said, I think the earliest sketches from Nail are from jun 13 2017.. Or at least around there, that’s when I actually uploaded them to his toyhouse. So it likely was drawn sooner. Which means tomorrow he would have been created 9 years ago! Wow! Like many FFAK characters, especially in the early few years of the comic - I cannot really tell you if there really was much of a “before” or “after” when a character appears. Many times, characters sort of just.. Clicked all together at once, maybe in a couple of days or right on the page itself - and naturally I would connect many things about them that would “make sense” somehow. At least to me at the time, I often would just decide many things right away and go with it as a domino effect of something else before it.
For Nail, he was made as a reaction to me creating Dr Slate.. And the creation of Dr Slate is actually an even older thread, where Spoon vrs Rock was meant to happen quite early in the comic (first introduced in chapter 8) and got pushed back. It continued slightly in ch12, until Nail’s intro disrupted it, then finally actually resolved in ch14 along with many other character threads in the present day. That all is a long story - but that’s also kind of what happened a lot in ARC1.
original concept sketches i made sometime in 2017, i think
To look at Dr Slate, I then have to trace it back to Agent Rock vrs Agent Spoon. Rock was always meant to die - he is a “meant to die” character. Sometimes “meant to die” characters save themselves and that can be a good or bad choice. But by the time I finally caught up to Rock’s fight with Spoon which was something I really wanted to actually finish/get to, I knew I had to really commit this time and have him killed. I avoided consequences too much in FFAK and he had to die. However, by the time I got back to him and his battle, I had already developed many other plotlines that would occur after his death.
In ch8, I already established with Rock’s character that he had come from a large family and that his father was dead - killed by Spoon who framed Fork for the murder. Rock also lost all his siblings to Spoon and was a fairly popular Agent for Heel. Of course, I naturally wondered about his family. There’s some other aspects of this that was planned from the moment of his conception but I can’t really detail that now or it would be spoilers. So i’ll save that part. Anyway, I wondered how those back at Heel would react and if Rock had ANY other remaining family who would hear the news.. Which is where I put together his uncle, Slate, a “older” hekaton man who was a doctor. His character was going to help the rest of the Heel team after they returned home and also inherit the rem-bots as his .. weird robot nephews. However, what I thought would be so fun/exciting to include - was a creepy weed janitor offering Slate flowers in his condolences for the death - all while grinning excitedly because he heard the news Spoon was alive. This character, while vague in my mind, I knew was important to Spoon and his story which I still had many gaps in understanding his origins. I knew he was a character Spoon had killed, that once was tied very closely to his life - even without drawing them yet these were the vague ideas that came to my mind imagining pieces of this scene.
Side note, Rock actually was going to be a human cyborg and killed instead by Scissor in the same location, or something vaguely similar to it. He would discover Scissor’s secret by smashing his face plate open and Scissor would have to kill him despite the two of them being on the same team. This did not happen, obviously - at the time Rock also did not have any robot bodyguards - but aspects of that were part of the conception of HIS character before he appeared in the comic. Paper also was not meant to be a worm but actually a D-type hekaton (lol!) but I never actually drew her as that, she didn’t stay that way long enough to get any ideas out. However, if she had been made this way - she would have been the very first D-type hekaton character I thought of for the story. A bit wild to consider.
Getting back to Nail’s origins here, I designed his story backwards. I find I do this a lot and in some ways, it helps me limit the result of what happens because I already know that part. For spoon, his concept of a character was that of the half man, the “leg” version - and then I naturally thought to myself.. Was he always that way? .. or.. If he wasnt.. What happened to the other half? This isn’t my method for all characters but I think it helps explain a bit of the “creative journey” that often is just done mentally and.. Can happen quickly, you know. You ask a question and answer it, sometimes with more questions and.. I feel it doesnt take long before you have enough there that’s very interesting and you feel confident enough about the ideas that it feels right to include. It doesnt matter if you have all the answers because there’s a level of trust in yourself that.. If you have enough that you need, then.. You’re good to go. I like having room to explore and a little bit of mystery, even in the characters I’ve thought about for over a decade. There’s always more perspectives and angles to consider, especially when you include more perspectives.
So.. who was this janitor weed guy and why did he want to have revenge on Spoon? I felt, he was a close friend. A partner. Someone that Spoon threw away and moved on from to be devoted to Knife instead. Spoon pretends that guy doesn’t exist and maybe he did forget him, after all - Spoon’s a ruthless killer. There’s plenty of people trying to get their revenge on him, this janitor would be no different but.. I also thought there was something interesting about this unassuming character. He felt a bit like a weak loser, no one who could actually pose a threat to Spoon but.. I knew Scissor was RIGHT there in his close vicinity. Could this janitor .. do something to him? Would Scissor recognize him? Would Scissor not realize who this janitor was and the janitor would be able to catch Scissor in his own deception and lies.. It made me think, how could this weed janitor be a threat to Spoon? And .. i wanted him to be a big threat to Spoon too. An unknown element that Simon didn't think he’d have to account for, that he really doesn’t have a solid plan for how to eal with, especially when he has so many other plots and schemes he’s juggling. This one guy he did harm to could ruin everything he’s put together. It was too exciting to me to have this plot for Simon, this great consequence of having his past catch up to him that no one else would know about - a secret between him and some janitor.. That kind of story felt exciting to me and I had to do it. There was just no way for me not to do it.
But then I had to figure out who this new guy was and what happened.. How old were they, how did they meet.. Ect. You might see here, I did not “originally” plan for Nail to be the son of Aeschylus/Canary, I did not even “plan” for him to be the fork.. But.. it felt strange to not know who the fork was - when I knew who the spoon/knife were. It felt strange to not.. Have any kind of idea who or what happened with Aeschylus and Canary’s offspring. Like.. those things should have reasons there to them. I knew already, the spoon/knife were older than the fork.. Much older.. But then where did the fork come from? Are they still alive? But, just like with Scissor - I thought about the unassuming janitor so close to Simon.. It made sense to me that the other half of Simon should also have this… “unexpected consequence” to sneak up on him. It clicked to me that Nail HAD to be a mandragora. He HAD to be the fork. Simon thought he was gone but he was there THE WHOLE TIME..
I could have made Nail not related to Canary and Aeschylus, im not sure if I considered it or not because it was so long ago.. I don’t really remember how many of these things were actually decided or how long either. As i was building nail up as a character I knew that I wanted him to also parallel Locket, who was also recently introduced into the story as a foil to Knife. This “i didn’t expect you” character that throws the whole balance of power by having a strong opponent that was hunting these strong forces in the world. You can’t always be the guy that’s on top and untouchable, younger generations will catch up.. I don’t want to have any character in FFAK without something that would expose their weakness, something they can’t just punch and stab their way to victory. I hate characters that are permanently strong. So I already had a desire to reinforce Locket and Nail as these looming threats closing in, wanting some kind of revenge.. That kind of thing. It gave me a lot to think about how they’d react to each other as well.
Nail was already dead and murdered by Spoon by the time I had the initial idea of his character. I knew he had to become a weed somehow.. And he had to have become infected with the virus before he died. These were more things I had to answer and account for.. Nail’s character is a bit like, cumbersome for a lot of these decisions and .. him having connections to such a vast amount of characters can make him appear very like, convenient in this sense narratively of it being like.. “How can he be part of all this stuff?” And it’s not like I don’t agree on some level but.. FFAK needed to have a way to pull all these unrelated things together. Especially at the time of when I was deeply struggling with it in the 2017-2019 period.. I didn’t really know where I was going or how to get back to anything I wanted to actually do. I didn’t know how to resolve so much of the story. I was stressed and lost, both creatively and in my real life which was falling apart.. I had no idea what to do for my future or the future of my comic. So Nail kind of.. Nailed.. Everything together, lmao. He pulled together all these threads and was the metaphorical thumbtack of where all this stuff was connected by. I liked that so much about him because it was by accident. He just so happened to fit so many of these roles and because he was a FFAK character made a little “later” than many of the others - he felt like the FFAK character that was made in response to what FFAK ended up being and was. He was not yet another one off character put in because it was a cool idea, or I just felt like it.. That might not really have much of a purpose beyond that.. Nail was a character designed in mind of these plots, these characters and he had so much purpose for the direction of the story right out the gate before even being drawn or named.
To me, Nail is.. The plot of FFAK, not the only one but.. Because he crosses over into every aspect of the plot - he feels like this very active participant. A queen on a chessboard, able to move in every direction across the board of the story. I love and loved that so much about him because he’s very unique in that aspect. There is no other FFAK character that can be this role, it was his destiny in a way. That’s why i frame so much of this second arc to him and his perspective, his journey of regaining his autonomy and personhood felt thematically in line with what FFAK is too. Maybe he showed up a little “late” to the game but I like that he also was the consequence of my impulsive choices in my writing of this story. He’s caught up to me and I can’t fully control him either, he’s too smart and too capable. I love having this.. Character that gives me a limit. I cant have certain characters just do everything they want, just because they can.. I have to account for Nail and his perspective. This helps things from spiraling too much without being able to keep things in check. Without him there, the whole board falls apart. It’s disjointed and.. What even is the story without at least one character pulling the boat to the shore of the ending.
For him to have eyes like Aeschylus, yes they are hidden.. But.. Aeschylus is the first real “worm” of FFAK to me. He is the iconic symbol of the worm, the base design that I used as a way of creating the look of FFAK and it’s characters. Many people wanted to read FFAK because of that character, he was the first character to get fanart for - praised, readers were heartbroken over.. That kind of thing was so unexpected to me. I was really proud I could have made something like that. Part of me felt a bit embarrassed too that I didn’t have much planned for Aeschylus besides him dying and I kind of got frustrated with how much he overshadowed other things I actually wanted to do in FFAK. There’s a lot to say about Aeschylus in general but.. Being able to carry a symbol of him and his design in Nail felt important too. It fit. And that’s all there is to it, really.
Here in Nail’s first sketches, he actually had one eye and he is missing his iconic scorpion tail (wow!) - but he had a cyclops eye since that’s.. What Queen worms typically had. I didn’t really like his tail and I thought it was too flimsy. I didnt want him to be a cyclops either, so his design changed quickly and looks basically what he ended up with as a queen.
Umm, well, this was long so ill be amazed if people read all of it.. That’s just an example of the many things that go into a character/design in FFAK!
