As promised, a glimpse into my efforts of designing a hoverbike. For the current issue i’m working on, I wanted the Scowlers to have a vehicle to get them to and fro. I already have a vehicle called the Hellbat (which you’ll all see sometime) but I wanted to give them something they could patrol in. Giving them a car felt too.....pedestrian. To which I settled on a hover bike.
My big problem with a lot of hover bikes in fiction is that they often look and feel like slightly bigger mopeds but without wheels.
To which I think is completely lame.
The real requirements I had were that i didn’t want my bike to look too close to either the bikes from Akira or the Lawmasters from Judge Dredd. My first attempts (the big illustrations with Scowlers on them) were channeling in the Tron Legacy bikes. They were nice and all, but I wanted bikes that had a very definite front and back and these didn’t have that. And I wanted some sort of machinery in place of the wheels that looks like that’s what’s causing it to hover.
I went back to the drawing board and when I want to bang out some ideas i tend to do a lot of gesture doodles or silhouette sketches. I find there i’m less likely to get stuck on minor details and instead focus on the overall form. I still haven’t decided on a form yet, but I got an idea of what the final incarnation will look like.
