Chapter 1 - Page 7
In which Jennifer and Danielle’s philosophy professor encounters a hostile out-of-towner.
NOTES
I really don’t think I started hitting my stride until the next page; as a consequence, something like half this page got redrawn over the following month or so after initially posting it. The first panel was originally a boring straight-on long shot which contained the podium that forced me to answer the question, “What the hell is this university called, anyway?” The seal I made for it wasn’t any good; it was just the initials “ASU” in the same font I use for the chapter titles. If I need that seal again, I’ll come up with something better.
Nathan Bostworth is a guy I originally created for a completely different first SCWONKEY DOG story probably around the time I was in … eighth grade? Maybe early high school? It concerned Leonard trying to bring Scwonkey back to the SC Force from a sort of freelance agent lifestyle, and Bostworth was one of Scwonkey’s associates. Except the Bostworth in that story was a big alien guy, a “hired muscle” type, and he was dumb as a sack of bricks. A few years ago I decided to toss that character and recast him as a human professor at the local university, once I decided the university would be a key setting, except THEN he was a white guy with tiny glasses who could shoot energy out of his hands. Not bad, and I still want to use the costume design I did for him later on, but when I came to this page I decided SCWONKEY DOG needed a cool black guy. Not just a cool black guy, but a cool black guy who could power up and get ice blue DRAGON BALL Z hair. And we had already gotten Bostworth name-dropped on page three, which meant it would totally make sense to meet him now. So here he is!
Honestly, the cut to Bostworth packing up his class notes, or whatever, was born out of a desire to just draw something different for a bit. I still wasn’t really planning ahead at this point. I was just throwing a sheet of typing paper down and going, “So, what do I want to draw now?” This is probably a big part of the reason I wound up redrawing half of this stuff.
See that yellow-headed robot guy? Do you know how long the heroes of SCWONKEY DOG have been fighting yellow-headed robot guys? Somewhere around the house I have a tape of a play I wrote for school in the fifth grade in which a classmate named Byron Boldrini plays one of these stupid yellow-headed robot guys. Consequently, this is about the point where it started to sink in that, “Oh good lord, I’m actually doing SCWONKEY DOG for real.”
Oh, and Gruber Hall is named for the villain in the first DIE HARD movie. Not, like, in-story or anything, but that’s where I plucked the name from.
