Sonic Universe Online #52 Behind The Scenes!
Hello, everyone! Boy, it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, huh? But considering we finally managed to release this issue after its nightmarish production cycle, we decided that it was a good time to bring the “behind the scenes” posts back. There’s a lot to talk about with this one, so get ready for a real doozy!
As usual, let’s start with the cover. We wanted to have Bunnie and Scarlett as the focus, and RocketPOW! went through several drafts of what that would look like. In the end, we settled on having them playing cards in the bar from Sonic Mania’s Mirage Saloon Zone to fit with the desert theme. It’s also worth noting that we had Jack on the cover at one point but ultimately decided against it, since the story focuses more on his lackeys than himself.
Before we start on the actual story, I guess we should begin with the elephant in the room: Bunnie’s redesign. Even though we technically first saw her new look in issue 51, we might as well go over it now. Picking up from where the official comic left off, we knew that Bunnie had a redesign after being legionized, but the reboot happened before we ever got to see it. And with the redesign of such an important character, obviously there was a lot of pressure to do her justice. There was some old concept art by Tracy Yardley of legionnaire Bunnie, but we didn’t want to just take that and call it a day. We had quite a field day with many of our talented artists coming up with their own interpretations of her redesign, including @miitoons, @riggo-draws, @drawloverlala, @fritzymagpies, Tim Campbell, CrimDa, DoNotDelete, and more that I sadly can’t remember anymore. From the shape and function of her cybernetics, her overall color scheme, her clothing, her hairstyle, her weapons, etc., every last detail was meticulously gone over until we arrived at the final design taking what we liked most from each of them.
At first, we had gotten Tale to draw out the first several pages, and even though they were finished, he unfortunately had to step out of the issue and we had Gilgalad take over, better known as Thomas Rothlisberger, who we were lucky to have on the team before he moved on to the IDW Sonic comics. For the sake of consistency (lol), we unfortunately had to scrap Tale’s pages so he could redo those as well.
Holly’s sickness isn’t elaborated on in the actual story, but the gist is that she’s a snow leapord who was roboticized during the First Robotnik War. But after the Bem deroboticized her while she was in the desert, her body became sick due to being stuck in the inhospitable environment, which is an example of how misplaced many of the former Robians were being sent far out of their natural habitats, and losing the protection of their robot bodies was actually a detriment.
A Sonic fan with a good eye for detail may notice that the guard who takes over watching Bunnie after Scarlett is actually one of the unnamed members of Infinite’s Jackal Squad from the Sonic Forces prequel comic. Since this cameo may or may not go anywhere in regards to Infinite in ASO, we opted against using Infinite himself since he’s too important of a character to pass off as a mere cameo. If you want this plot thread to be expanded upon, let us know!
Since this is where we introduce Holly and her relationship with Scarlett, it’s as good a time as any to discuss the process of their creation. With Scarlett, we wanted to introduce a character who would serve as a foil to Bunnie, another person struggling due to their bedridden lover, but with diametrically-opposed views regarding cybernetics. Her design was actually taken from a random Sand Blaster who appeared in a single panel of StH #218, who we decided to turn into a full-fledged character. Although her species was unknown during her single appearance, we decided to make her a fennec fox. On the other hand, Holly was an entirely new design that we came up with for the story. The LGBT aspect of their relationship was actually the idea of my editor for the issue, The Shadow Imperator. I stated in the interview after the issue that I was the one who came up with their names, but that’s not the whole truth. There was a whole team effort dedicated to naming the two of them, before I suggested Scarlett since there was an abandoned plot point about how Bunnie’s true name was at one point planned to be Scarlett O’Hare. Our Scarlett’s full name is Scarlett O’Fenn, with ShadImp being the one to suggest adding the last name as well. But since her last name didn’t come up in the story, I apologize for forgetting to mention it. Holly was also one of several names I came up with, which was agreed on due to the sort of “snowy” feel it has to it.
In my initial draft for Scarlett and Holly’s conversation, I wrote Holly as being more openly pessimistic about her condition, outright stating that Scarlett would be better off if she was gone. But since that seemed rather inconsiderate to Scarlett’s feelings, ShadImp suggested that I tone it down a little and have her only mention feeling like a burden. He was also the one to suggest that I make sure their romantic relationship is mentioned as explicitly as possible, so there would be no room for ambiguity that might lessen the impact of their sexual orientation.
Scarlett taking off her hat here wasn’t actually in the script I wrote, but it was a smart move by Gilgalad, showing her letting her guard down around the one person she can afford to do so with. To put it simply, Scarlett offers Holly physical support while Holly offers Scarlett emotional support, so neither one is one-sidedly supporting the other. This scene also demonstrates that even though Scarlett is easily the most level-headed and compassionate Sand Blaster we’ve seen so far, some of the old bigotries and prejudice against cyborgs and robots that Jack instilled into her still remain.
Gilgalad had actually already penciled out the next couple pages, but since he wasn’t able to stick around for the full story, we decided that that the end of Scarlett and Holly’s scene was a good cutoff point for the drastic shift in art style. Red Rabbit is an amazing artist with a style very similar to Patrick Spaziante, but it is still a jarring shift compared to most other artists on the project. I had also originally written Bunnie mentioning not being very good at undercover missions, but when ShadImp brought up her successful operation tricking Battle Lord Kukku I changed the script to have her mention that instead.
At first, I was planning for the poker scene to have the characters holding cards that reflected their position in the conversation, such as holding a winning hand when they have the upper hand in the argument. But since I have absolutely no knowledge or experience with poker, that idea ultimately didn’t come through in the final story. This scene also serves to flesh out the Sand Blasters and show that none of them are blindly loyal to Jack. Tex obviously has his own agenda, Avery just goes along with whatever’s the least troublesome, Shift wants to get his hands on new technology, and Jolt does genuinely want the city to open up to the rest of the world.
You may have noticed that instead of rocket feet like her old design, Bunnie now flies with a removable jet pack on her back. If you’re wondering how that wouldn’t burn her tail off, it was specifically designed so that the fire trails would shoot aiming away from her tail.
Originally, during the car chase sequence Bunnie’s jet pack was just written to malfunction for no real reason. But eventually, I decided to give it a more interesting explanation by adding in hints that Shift may have intentionally sabotaged it to trip up Bunnie, only to reveal that he was actually trying to fix it and he didn’t betray her after all. This was also the portion of the story where Ink Pants took over for pencils, and then Lav after him. Even though they’re all fine artists in their own right, hopefully this will be the last time that we need to include so many drastic changes in art style to illustrate a single story.
We almost had one more shift in art style, with @gendeerfluid penciling the last page. In the end, Lav managed to finish that one as well, giving us a massive cliffhanger both figuratively and literally in the form of Jun Kun, the Iron King.
That’s about it for this one, folks! Thanks for sticking with us all this time, and look forward to the conclusion of this story next issue. Until then, keep on juicin’!
