Thursday, December 13, 2012

Character Development Special: The Singlebeeste

The Singlebeeste, currently wreaking havoc in my webcomic "The Wayward Queen", is so named because there is only one of it. And one is enough. This tenacious creature has a bottomless appetite, and can be found raiding kitchens, larders, and pantries wherever food is left unguarded. Once installed in a kitchen, it can be quite difficult to remove.

Yes, those are totally ear-wings. Yep, like Dumbo. Six limbs seemed strange, so I figured "hey, why not evolve ear-wings?" aaaand... yeah. This happened.
The Singlebeeste is another character with a rather long history. Like the Queen and Vitalia, it goes back to an earlier story I dabbled with as a sophomore in college. In its earliest form, it was a rather vague camel-like creature (actually, it changed every week, but the camel-form is all I have records of.) Here's an ancient tiny doodle, and some early comic pages from a short-lived comic based on the early story (yes, Vitalia was pretty obnoxious back then.) (And a princess.) The Singlebeeste was originally "tamed" by the then Princess Vitalia, and became sort of a companion and mount... How and why it was tamed never really made sense, but most of that story made no sense anyway.
Later, when I started developing the Wayward Queen around 2005-2006, the Singlebeeste happened to fit nicely into the plot, so I added it in. And redesigned it completely. Here's some of the development doodles for the current Singlebeeste... It seems to have changed from a winged-camel-thing to some sort of horned-dog-bear with ear wings... I'm not sure which version is more goofy and implausible, but this one's cuter.
And somewhere along the line I toyed with the idea of having Vitalia ride around on the thing again... Unfortunately this doesn't seem to fit the current plot. But I reserve the right to make it happen sometime, somewhere! Because, this scenario is too cute:

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