Hector Plasm

I love Benito Cereno and Nate Bellegarde's Hector Plasm. He narrowly edges out Dylan Dog as my favorite occult/supernatural investigator. Probably because he has a knife called Astyanax, which was the name of Hector's son in Greek mythology. But more importantly, it was the name of a totally badass side-scrolling platformer I played the Hell out of on NES.

After doing a few speedy layout sketches, I did the final pencils for this on a 5"x5" square of old Bristol board I had laying around, managing to lose all the energy and dynamism of my sketches. Which is a common problem when I draw. Go me! Also, I had to repeatedly go back and slim him down, as I kept giving him a superhero-ish physique.

Then I brush-inked it, scanned it, tweaked the brightness/contrast, filled the blacks in, and then shrunk it down to a teensy bit smaller than the physical drawing. For anyone wondering what's up with the 4/H logo, Hector controls the four humors of his body, and the number's commonly present on his clothes. I thought it'd be neat to break a capital "H" to make a symbol that references the number four, the humors, and his name, Hector. Maybe they already did this in the most recent Hector book, Totentantz. I wouldn't know, since my comic shop couldn't get it for me.

Then I decided to try out the black and white scanning option on my scanner, and kept it blown up to see how it looks. I guess I'll just start scanning my stuff in B&W and save some time. Eh.

I'm not entirely happy with how this came out, but I feel like my atrophied art muscles are starting to wake up a little.