Except...worse than that?
Yup, I'd say you can blame Ken Penders for that (among some other things, but I digress). Not exactly a fan-favorite story. Barely anything ever happened in it, and not even Ian Flynn's 30 Years Later story was that much better. Besides the ridiculous writing and the 100 other problems with this arc, do you want to know what really gets on my nerves?
The child characters.
Oh, but this was the Penders run of the comic, infamous for bad designs and outright clones...
So Surely Flynn's run was better right?
Yeah, and I'm Mickey Friggin' Mouse. Clones as far as the eye can see.
Sure I only showed two of them, but do I have to show more? All of them except for Lara Su (who still wasn't that well designed) were like this. Their designs were horrible. Needless to say I hate that mentality of "oh a character's kids can be clones because genetics!" Genetics does not work like that at all. Kids can resemble even the grandparents and it would still make sense. Have more faith in your audience's intelligence, for God's sake. I'm not even joking when I say even the Disney Sequels had better designed child characters than this...not all the time, but they had better ones than this.
Although the personalities are another story entirely...I'd say M:XYL screwed that up about as bad as the Disney Sequels did....but that's not what I'm focusing on.
So anyways, I've seen quite a few artists on Tumblr redesign some of these child characters from this arc, and needless to say these guys actually had an understanding of character design. Quite a few of them are quite impressive.
For the hell of it, I decided to do redesigns of Sonia and Manik, Sonic and Sally's kids from the future storyline.
Huh...it's been a few days since I actually drew these..,
Anyways, when I first started these redesigns, the first thing that I did was block out a basic shape to them. In other words, I crafted a silhouette. One of the ideal rules of character design is that you should be able to tell characters apart from purely their shadows or silhouettes. They should have their own shapes and sizes, basically. I kept certain elements of the design in my mind when painting the silhouettes, and then I made a more detailed sketch. After that, I gave them their colors.
For the designs, even though I know that it is discouraged by the more grown-up side of the Sonic the Hedgehog fan community, I sort of made a hybrid. Except...I actually put more thought into them and only made minor fusions of parts.
Manik's tail highly resembles Sally's (a chipmunk mobian) but I kept him as a hedgehog just for the sake of staying "faithful". His eyes are a brighter blue than Sally's and his green fur is a similar color to Sonic's eyes. I thought that giving him black cuffs on his gloves would be a sort of homage to Tails. His shoes are his own, but I did try to make them appear more blocky and angular than Sonic's. Also, like Sally, he has tuft on his cheeks. Furthermore, his hair style is similar to Sally's. I kept in the gap in his teeth.
In Sonia's case, I straight up gave her Sonic's eyes. She's a squirrel because her granddad (Nigel Acorn) is one. Her outfit is supposed to match her shoes, which are almost like Sonic's, except for the gold cuffs. Her fur is more reddish and darker than Sally's. I also tried to make her eyes look less...elegant than Sally's...or maybe it's more playful or round....Her hair deliberately resembles Sonic's quills. I want to say that her hair is naturally that color. I guess you could also say she dyes it...but I personally wouldn't say that. I also decided to give Sonia a scarf that matches her eyes. I was thinking of Sonic Boom to be fair, but I also thought it could be an element of her design unique to her...
So how do you like them?
I enjoyed doing these quite a bit.
RANDOM PLUG!!!
Oh, just because I love her work, here is drawloverlala's redesign of Lara-Su.
Go check out her tumblr now, she has a bunch of other redesigns that are seriously awesome!↴
http://drawloverlala.tumblr.com/tagged/My-art
(She also has a deviantart account under the same name!)
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