by Dave Baker
When I first started drawing Halloween Boy I don’t think I realized it was going to be a project that would take up the better part of five years. It started as a silly side project. But like so many of these things do, it took on a life of its own. There’s no greater evidence to this than the visual aesthetic of the character.
Halloween Boy Vol 1: Last of the Halloween Boys is a passion project of mine. It follows an action adventure pulp-inspired protagonist as he attempts to help people out of no-win scenarios. Each chapter of the book is him taking up some sort of lost cause or unwinnable scenario. It’s influenced by things like Doc Savage, Hellboy, and classic 1930s horror movies.
Initially, Halloween Boy was created from the spark of an idea. I had a passing thought about a legacy version of Lee Falk’s The Phantom. So, I started drawing him. Logically, I assumed the character should wear purple overalls. I wanted him to be a bit more workman-like. Maybe cribbing some shine from the aesthetic of military fatigues. After drawing a few hundred pages of him, I quickly realized that this was a gargantuan mistake. When listening to an interview with Mark Chiarello about his time coloring Mike Mignola’s seminal Hellboy comic strip. I latched on to an idea he posited about how no one in the comic would be colored red other than Hellboy. Thus, drawing the reader’s eye to him and making him feel subconsciously more important.
That got me thinking, was purple the best color to draw the eye? The name of the character was Halloween, after all. What is the most common color associated with the holiday? Orange. I quickly set about rethinking the character’s visual identity.
I kept the military fatigues and endless pouches, but I switched the color from purple to orange. This completely altered the character’s visual impression. He went from being what felt like a supporting character to a lead. That simple tweak? Changed everything.
Similarly, initially, Halloween Boy’s costume did not feature large bat-like triangular ears. Instead, they were small and cute, made only to emphasize the silhouette and draw attention to the fact that it was not his hair. That it was, in fact, a cowl. However, the more I drew, the more I realized there was something satisfying about having these large, triangular protrusions emanating from Halloween Boy’s head. Does it make any literal sense? No, but in a grand and theatrical design sense there is something very iconic about a triangle being over laid on the human skull.
These are both perfect examples of how no amount of planning can replace the creative process. You’re making thousands and thousands of choices. And they layer on top of each other. And they make something that’s greater than the sum of their parts.
There’s something about just sitting down at the table and making whatever the task at hand requires that will eventually push you into building something that’s more unique than if you were just trying to create in a vacuum. If I were to just draw a single character design? I don’t think I’d ever truly arrived at the idea of large triangular ears.
The amount of times that I have tried to design a character that I thought would be iconic and failed or too numerous to count. But every time I’ve drawn a book with a primary protagonist at the forefront, you’d be shocked at how quickly people start commenting that the character design is easily identifiable. There’s something about the pressure of doing a thing that forces you to find solutions that you would never find in the cold vacuum of infinite possibility.
Obviously, I am a comic book artist so I’m drawing on those parallels. However, this idea, I think, extends into every artistic practice. I’ve worked in numerous artistic disciplines. I’ve written movies, worked on animated TV shows, been a digital video producer, and written basically anything that involves the written word. And the one thing that all of these disciplines have taught me is that I really need to divorce myself from the idea that something worthwhile can be created outside of the process of its own creation.
You’re never going to really know what a thing is, what it’s trying to say, or how difficult it will be to make… until you actually go out and make it.
They say that every movie is a documentary of its own making, and I feel like that is true about almost every artistic enterprise I’ve ever been involved in. The final product is a combination of thousands and thousands of small decisions that eventually coalesce into something tangible. And without all of those tiny decisions undergirding and supporting a big swing, you just never get to something truly interesting.
You’ll never make anything worthwhile unless you’re actually making the thing. There’s a toxic mindset amongst writers that thinking about a thing is actually writing. It’s not. Writing is writing. It’s the same for every other practice. You need to roll up your sleeves and actually make the thing in order to have the identity of someone who makes things.
Pitching a thing, describing a thing, or emphasizing what possibilities could exist are all valuable skills, but they are not the same thing as building an idea up from the ground floor. These things transpire over years and years. It takes so long to actually produce them, the longer you delay, the longer it’ll be before they’re finished.
It’s a hard won lesson. One that I wish functioned any other way than it does. But at the end of the day whenever I’m lost in that dreaded no man’s land of The Middle of a project, I always look back and think well I’ve made it this far. What am I gonna give up? No? I’m gonna keep going. Cause that’s the only way to see what I’m actually making and then I can always go back and make it better.
Halloween Boy, Vol. 1: Last of the Halloween Boys is available everywhere books are sold from Oni Press.
