Canadian Thanksgiving is before Halloween? That’s Un-American!
My suitcase was packed so tight I could not have fit a scanner and lightbox in there if I wanted to, and I prefer that over cintiq clean-up. More scribbles it is.
In my head Tesh defaults to a sweater vest most often outside of his uniform now, which is weird to me because I feel like a sweater vest is not his style even though he dresses up in a vest and wears layered clothing. Initially that outfit and the side-part was his cousin’s and Tesh pretended to be him by wearing pale makeup and a similar thing, but I liked him in it so I let him have it. That’s how I see him out and about running errands during the daylight hours but not when he’s just relaxing or whatever.
Speaking of cousins, Sidmund’s taller, leaner, younger cousin Marten rocks his slacker outfit squid hoodie which I think would look kind of KKK if I ever colored him in it since he’s white-ish. I don’t particularly like or dislike any Sid and Marty Krofft shows or know anything about them but had paired the names together anyway. Marten is a sushi chef who gets himself caught up in and working for the fish-themed mafia. Things of course get worse for him when he tries to get out. He lives on 10Fin Island, where Tesh grew up. Their moms are sisters who are originally from another country and have foreign accents. Their father's life, love, and lady is the sea. They are brothers as well. They are not that close, like they’d see each other a few times a year growing up. Still Marten tracks Tesh down so he can crash at his place in 3Han to hide out.
Marten has a long list of food allergies, most things that aren’t sea food, that trigger different swollen and bumpy krakken-like transformations that he would take on and then destroy certain businesses that didn’t comply with mob. It would be mistaken by the public as attacks from sea monsters (why not, there are sewer monsters). He’d be treated afterwards by a mob doctor and have to recover. He gets to a point where he can’t take it anymore, not so much morally but physically. Marten has so many allergies, even non-food ones, that Biesel is convinced that maybe he was meant to be a sea monster and is living a lie. In the end everyone, except Marten, ultimately agrees and they set him adrift in the ocean on tiny wooden raft with nothing but the clothes on his back, but once a few toxic waste barrels start surfacing they figure they might be making things worse, so they just lock him up.
Since very early on Tesh has lived in a bachelor apartment in an old building downtown. I saw it as a dark place but with huge windows, like the lights were always off and it was lit from outside. There’s artwork on canvases stashed in a corner and one wall decorated with large abstract ink splatter paintings. Sometimes I’d picture Tesh sitting clothed in a bathtub full of his own ink. Later on I went more into his past/childhood where the ink would start to leak out of his hands so he’d have to drain them every once in a while to prevent that from happening. Since he already liked to draw and paint he began painting with his ink the avoid the buildup. After becoming a cop he also started using it as a projectile instead of the gun he was issued. He still carries a gun, he just doesn’t use it.
Tesh doesn’t have a car for a long time but eventually gets a purple pickup truck with huge wheels. He is the primary driver of the tiger-faced paddy wagon. He can also operate a motorcycle but doesn’t own one while Denny has a couple.
Kind of a soft-looking Tesh and a hard-looking Monty, methinks. I imagine that whenever Tesh and Marymont get to arguing Biesel’s off to the side somewhere going,“Get a room.” Monty’s in what I call his shopping clothes, where he’s got winged shades on and is trying to live life a bit more modestly instead of strutting around in a suit and top hat like when he is in rich snob mode. Monty becomes less of a snob over time, but it still seeps in occasionally. His sister, Mistra who he calls Misti, continues her life of crime and frivolous spending with zero regrets. Their butler, Ooncle, fills Mistar’s shoes as her partner in crime while he is out playing good cop. Ooncle’s a fairly old character, he didn’t even start off with an animal theme, yet I think I’ve only drawn him maybe twice in all these years. Well I guess he wasn’t as important early on since all he did was butler stuff and wasn’t Mistra’s suck-up friend and accomplice yet. There’s a ton about characters that has gone unsaid since I only did the one comic many years ago. Maybe I should fill my blog with character spotlights as a creative outlet, hopefully with more color and less sketches.
