#ask tag

[otaku553]

Well, if you're sharing WIPs from the last chapter, I wanna see bald Ace lineart please!!!

Ask and ye shall receive!

By the second page I finally figured that most of him would be covered by fire or water anyways and stopped bothering with lining it lmao

[lakesparkles]

oh my dog,,,I love all of ur little Ramona doodles so very berry much!!!!/gen/pos

however I do ask!! do you have any doodles of scott? or like- does he also have an animal design?

First thing, thank you a lot for liking my Ramonas!!! :D

And hm, I don't draw Scott himself that much, but I did a little compilation of some I had:

And he does have an animal design, he's a dog!! At first, he was a duck tolling retriever

But then I realized I could do better so I redesigned him to be a beagle

[desceros]

DREDGE AU LEO'S MARKINGS GLOWING IN THE FOG *starts foaming at the mouth and dies*

God I love that

i did a dramatic reenactment of the conversation where we realized this

[silverwhittlingknife]

Good morning. I'm fairly new to batfamily comics and I was wondering if you know what the design inspirations for the nightwing black and blue suit are? Is it mentioned in the comics? I live in New Zealand and all the robins here are all black, except the south island robin which has a splash of white on its chest. To me the nightwing suit looks very reminiscent of New Zealand robins, though I'm sure that's just familiarity bias.

GOOD MORNING!!! I had no idea there were blue robins!! That is extremely cool & these birds are my friends now <333 There are (tragically) no blue robins in comics AFAIK, but the Nightwing costume design is still fun to trace...

The Nightwing Costume: A History

Nightwing I, Nightwing II, and a 1980s punk rocker.

Short version: The Nightwing black+blue+yellow costume is something Clark Kent wears in 1960s Superman comics, where the colors are inspired by Batman's costume - both in-universe and out-of-universe. So when Dick originally takes on the costume, it's an homage to both Batman and Superman. <3 The exact history gets tweaked a few times, but those basic vibes are usually consistent.

Long version: IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO HEAR SO MUCH MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW re:a bunch of Doylist comics history followed by the various Watsonian explanations for Dick's costume choices, I have rambled about this below the cut in three parts:

1960s and 70s: Nightwing I: Superman and Jimmy Olsen, the Dynamic Duo of Kandor!!

1980s and Onward: Nightwing II: Dick Grayson's New Teen Titans & Gen X Influences

In-Universe Explanations for Dick's Costume: A History

1960s + 70s: The DYNAMIC DUO OF KANDOR

Superman 158: The first appearance of Nightwing I!

Nightwing I - he's actually just Superman in another costume - was created for adventures in the Bottled City of Kandor! Kandor was invented in 1958 by Action Comics writer Otto Binder; it was a Kryptonian city shrunk by Braniac and kept as a trophy. Clark rescued the bottled city from him, kept it in the Fortress of Solitude, and sometimes used a shrink ray to shrink himself down to visit the city. (This was the 50s and 60s! Goofy sci-fi was in!) Kandor was a great setting for Superman stories because Clark could interact with a Kryptonian city without time travel. Plus, since Kandor had a miniature red sun, Clark could have adventures there where he didn't have powers.

In 1963, Superman writer Edmond Hamilton got the idea of having Superman and Jimmy Olson go undercover in Kandor. They have to come up with superhero disguises -- so naturally, Clark "takes a cue from his old friends Batman and Robin, and he and Jimmy Olsen become - The DYNAMIC DUO OF KANDOR!"

Nightwing and Flamebird's names got linked to newly-invented Kryptonian birds (you can see the birds in the cages behind them) - therefore paralleling Batman and Robin, inspired by Earth's bats and robins!

Readers loved Clark and Jimmy's buddy-movie adventures as Nightwing and Flamebird, and the story conceit stuck around for quite a while. If you're curious, you can read a bit more about the stories here! I like them; they're goofy but adorable.

Kandor eventually got written out in 1979, when a writer who was bored with it "fixed" the city and had Clark find a way to make all the people normal size. No more adventures for Clark and Jimmy...

This meant that the Nightwing name was up for grabs.

1980s: The NEW TEEN TITANS & Gen X Influences

In 1984 - five years after Kandor, Nightwing, and Flamebird had gotten written out of Superman comics - Marv Wolfman and George Pérez wanted to give Dick a new name and costume in Tales of the Teen Titans 44. They landed on Nightwing. It was a perfect legacy identity, representing an homage to both of Dick's role models: an identity that was used by Superman, but modeled after Batman.

Although the name stayed the same, the costume changed quite a bit! The design changes are IMO revealing both of the era in general and of some characterization choices Wolfman and Pérez were making for Dick.

Pérez - the artist, and therefore the guy who redesigned the Nightwing costume - gave a 1987 interview where he said this about Dick:

Robin/Nightwing, I like him a lot because of his history, he’s been around so long, and there’s a certain sleek sexuality about the character. He’s got a certain sense of everyman, a young swashbuckler type...

IMO you can see those elements in Pérez's design - it's got vaguely piratical/swashbuckler vibes, and my extensive research (...okay, this article on 80s fashion trends) suggests that this very silly-looking Halloween costume may indeed be riffing on edgy sex symbols of the 1980s.

And both those choices are in keeping with the vibe of New Teen Titans, an aggressively not-kid-appropriate comic that was trying to do a more mature / edgy / adult take on superheroes.

What does that mean, "more mature"? Partly, it just meant, uh, sex. Dick and Kory were actually the first DC couple to ever be implied to be having premarital sex (in NTT 28 in 1983, where they're shown in bed together); in earlier eras, this would've been forbidden by the Comic Code Authority, which banned "illicit sex," sympathetic criminals, and a bunch of other things.

But it's not just about sex. In the 80s, comic readers were getting older and more impatient with moralizing in general; wholesome role models were out and sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll were in. Wolfman and Pérez were reinventing Dick as an aged-up, angsty, angry young man who was part of a more soap opera-esque team, with characters sleeping with each other and getting jealous and getting married and fighting with each other and generally making a lot of understandable-but-edgier decisions.

The switch to the Nightwing costume, a few years in, aesthetically mirrors Dick's shift in characterization from preppy good kid to angsty rebel:

Nightwing II, or, "What would happen if you took Superman-pretending-be-Batman and stuck him in a blender with Billy Idol?"

Pérez started with the blue-and-yellow color scheme of the original Nightwing - which is just copying Batman, right down to the utility/antigravity belt. But for Dick, Pérez tweaked it to add 1980s fashion details that were Hip With The Edgy Youth, like a deep V-neck showing the chest, bling-y accents, and big flaps for the shirt collar.

(Billy Idol had become a huge success in 1983, the year before Dick became Nightwing; the punk rocker was a college dropout and fashion icon for Gen X's edgy young men ... Look, I'm not saying he's a direct inspiration for Dick's costume, I'm just saying!! Similarities, no?? The other obvious point-of-reference is 70s disco - thus the fan nickname "disco-wing" - which had been popularized by John Travolta, another celebrity dropout.)

You can see a parallel shift in Dick's relationship to education - in the 1970s, he was basically a Good Role Model And Responsible College Student at Hudson University, where AFAIK he stayed in his first semester of college for about a decade. By contrast, in 1980, the first issue of New Teen Titans kicks off with Dick having dropped out of college and having tensions with Bruce about it - not a stereotypical "good kid" choice.

Dick in New Teen Titans 1, looking... a little bit dopey, let's face it; he may be a cool & edgy college dropout now but his motorcycle kinda looks like it belongs to a middle-schooler

By NTT 34 in 1987, Dick's costume had gotten more dramatic and his motorcycle had gotten significantly cooler-looking:

Over time, the Nightwing costume got tweaked in various ways to get more sedate and to add a more birdlike V-shape to the chest, but that's the Nightwing origin story!

Okay, so that's out-of-universe. But what about IN-UNIVERSE EXPLANATIONS for Dick's costume?

WHAT A GOOD QUESTION. There are three you can choose from!

FIRST OFF, in the original 1984 story, Dick says he got the idea from a costume Clark wore - a reference to Clark and Jimmy's adventures in Kandor.

BUT THEN, in the post-Crisis reboot, the Bottled City of Kandor got deleted from continuity for a while, along with Clark and Jimmy's history of being Nightwing and Flamebird. (Crisis on Infinite Earths was a late-1980s event that merged DC's Earth-One and Earth-Two, retconned a lot of backstories, erased a lot of goofier story elements, and tried to create a more streamlined DCU. Fans usually call the comics that were published after this event "post-Crisis comics," because "thecomicsthatwerepublishedpost-CrisisonInfiniteEarths" can't be said five times fast.)

With Kandor gone, the name's origin had to be tweaked a bit. In post-Crisis, Dick still gets the name idea from Superman, but it's from a Kryptonian legend that Clark knows, as opposed to a costume Clark wore.

And then in Nightwing: Year One, a retcon/retelling midway through post-Crisis, Dixon tweaks things a bit further, so that instead of the Robin costume being an homage to the Graysons' costumes (a Wolfman retcon in LPoD), it's instead the Nightwing costume which is an homage to the Graysons' costumes, and it's deliberately modeled after something John Grayson wore.

... So in-universe, the possible explanations are basically:

Pre-Crisis: Dick got both the name and the costume design from Superman, who came up with them in order to imitate Batman, OR

Post-Crisis: Dick got the name from Superman, and Dick came up with the costume on his own - probably still deliberately imitating Batman's color choices, OR

Post-Crisis: Dick got the name from Superman and the design from John Grayson's acrobat costume.

(The post-Crisis period ended in 2011 with Flashpoint, so for a while people called post-2011 comics "post-Flashpoint," but nowadays it's usually divided into DC's branded eras: new 52, Rebirth, and Infinite Frontier. I don't think those eras have any significant retcons to Dick's costume origin, but I'm not 100% sure.)

ALL THAT SAID, I love the idea of "it's Robin, but blue," so thank you; that's adorable and it's gonna live in my heart forever now <333

[sapphire-to-the-rain]

Fruit stand 👉🏻👈🏻

“doodle” i say, then create a full fledged illustration (im not complaining though i’m proud of this!!!!)

prompt list

[pobblebonked]

Your robot tf art makes me feel so seen honestly. It’s like yes!!!! That is what I want!!!!!!

thank you!!!!! we all love a robot!!!

[shesmore-shoebill]

maybe this is a CRAZY disaster!amanda fic but what if she knows angela likes her like amanda can so clearly tell that angela feels more for her than others in the way she treats amanda. so amanda is soooooo careful as to not break angela’s heart because the last thing she wants to do is hurt angela. if you look at the merch promo clip, angela’s sooooo attached to amanda’s, but amanda’s eyes are open like she’s worried or thinking about something. so amanda’s mind is going “fuck i don’t wanna hurt angela” but doesn’t realize that she already deep down has fallen for angela. and that’s why she doesn’t wanna see angela hurt and cares about angela specifically soooo much. amanda just hasn’t realized the last part of her also being in love with angela.

if that made any sense…

oh now THAT'S a thought.

as always, eternal disclaimer that I am treating this all as an exercise in fiction. This is about RPF imaginings and not meant to reflect onto the actual people in any way, but playing around in a fictional universe, with fictional characters. Even with photo/video sources, they're being treated as inspiration only. This is not in any way intended as speculation on the actual scenarios or the people involved.

Okay, that said, the specific rpf interpretation of Amanda worrying/caring so deeply about Angela that it actively impedes her ability to recognize/realize/process her own feelings is VERY fun. Delicious. Its like an extended twist on the "prioritizing the wellbeing of someone else above your own" trope, but without the undercurrent of "because you dont value yourself enough" trope that i can find hit or miss depending on how it's executed. I love it as like, Amanda's concern and care for Angela is just so overpowering that it sets up kind of a blindspot, and nestled right in the center of that blindspot? Amanda's own feelings towards Angela.

this just sets up such fun characterization possibility for Amanda!!! aah. Maybe there IS an element of, Amanda flinching away from the strength of her feelings and redirecting it into "worrying about Angela". But mostly it is genuine care and concern for Angela, that underlines everything else.

And like Amanda gets Angela smiling at her like she hung the sun and Amanda gets Angela hugging her like she could disappear, and the swell of emotion and affection is matched and maybe outpaced by that gut dropping thought of. oh god what if i lose this. what if i break this. what if i fuck this up. Looking at Angela as something so wonderful, and caring so deeply about her that the joy is outweighed by the worry of losing it or not protecting it sufficiently. Of failing Angela.

Fascinating to think about a characterization of Amanda really feeling the peak of that love and affection and emotion and her instinctive reaction to be "oh god, how could i lose this, how could i go wrong." Enough to have that overtake her whole brain in a way that even blots out her own realization of her own feelings. Really putting the Disaster in disaster Amanda huh.

Hmmm. I think I could see this if there were something specific that triggered the strength of that protective/worried response- maybe a recent bad breakup or something. And so Amanda's gut reaction is worry, is concern, is- i need to make sure Angela's wellbring is top priority, and it skews her judgement away from even her own feelings. (Maybe even loops back around to being detrimental to Angela, because of how much her judgement gets skewed...)

Oh, and this doesn't even get into the fun around what Angela's feelings throughout this are. Is this Angela aware of her own feelings? Is she trying to test the waters and actually being hurt by Amanda's reluctance? Is this Angela oblivious to her own feelings? Is this Angela aware of both her own AND Amands's feelings? So much possibility....

Id need to contemplate on this a little further but- fascinating. Fascinating. Def can run the risk of being a little more OOC depending on how it might be executed, but I think there's a way to pull it off. And as always, this is RPF, technically everything is ooc 😎 but i think there's a way to pull off the characterization so its internally consistent and rewarding.... delicious concept, ty.

[sirguyofdykesborn]

how are you a lesbian but he him

please... the pronouns is all i have left of my father

[insertdisc5]

i saw you use cohost. would you recommend is as a good/active twitter alternative? im getting tired of the hell hole that this bird website is

i really love cohost and the community there but it is absolutely NOT a twitter alternative. if anything it's a tumblr alternative.

here's my small speech about cohost and why i like it

it's a mix between tumblr and livejournal which is fun

the community is very fun and active! when i made my intro post i had a dozen people leaving a comment welcoming me to cohost which is a very nice feeling

it is very much NOT about likes and follower counts. in fact, there is no way for anyone to know how many likes a post has, or how many followers someone has. YOU dont even know how many followers you have

the only visible number is the number of comments on a post, which is where the community comes from: if you want people to know a post is great, you gotta leave a comment saying so!!!

you can have as many links as you want on your profile, AND you can have links be only visible to logged in users, only to people following you, or only visible to pages you follow... so it's a great way to have your discord only be visible to certain people for example

if you DO want a more twitter-like experience, there is a tag that's The Global Cohost Feed, so you have a bunch of posts from a lot of people

when you first join you will have a few days where you can't post anything, but you can still look at posts and share them. a lot of it must be so cohost can prepare code to bring you in or whatever, BUT it also means you get those couple of days to get to know the culture of the website a bit more! it's lovely

chronological feed my beloved

no algorithm my beloved

cohost does have some issues (adding images is a PAIN), but the staff is working really hard to fix them and is always listening to people's feedback! i like cohost a lot. join me

[terristre]

Okay if requests are open can I kindly request malleus and grim silliness?

Also hi hello I love your art sm :3 it's so silly and cute :33

best ive got is some cocomelon shit

[otaku553]

I think we all wanna know about the process for the last two pages

HAHA IM GLAD. THESE TWO PAGES TOOK FOREVER

I was really proud of them when I sketched them out and you can definitely see a lot of details ended up staying the same between the sketch and the final! These were the pages that I probably had the clearest ideas on because I wanted especially Ace drowning and Tage saving him to be impactful and pretty memorable, hence all of the different viewpoints and poses. Getting the head angle on that final page was really annoying but there are some excellent references on referenceangle.com for heads turned upwards, like the following:

What probably took the longest this time around was the lineart, actually, because I got Really Into It and couldn’t stop adding more detail.

This becomes! A trend! Because that one panel of Ace’s hair made me feel like I had to keep that consistent quality of lineart for the rest of the chapter even after that. So that’s why I had to split the chapter lmao

Extra notes on coloring:

Doing underwater pieces is actually a really good exercise for color theory, since warm colors in cool lighting and in a blue environment are often quite different than you’d expect them to be. You can definitely do a shortcut by using hard light blending mode on full opacity, as I’ve shown here, but when you use hard light blending mode, sometimes some specific colors may turn out muddled or brown-ish, like the orange, so I find picking your own colors also gives you some nice freedom over like. Cohesion in your palette.

The other thing that really makes the underwater scenes is the bubbles which are honestly a lot of fun to do! After you realize that bubbles are fundamentally just weird little glass/ mirror balls that take even less effort because the shapes will get distorted anyways you can sorta just do whatever. The key is mostly getting sharp contrast between the darker blues and the bright highlights I think?. If you want a tutorial on bubbles let me know :)

[misty-lilies]

ask game !! which one am i?

REBLOG PLEASE I SPENT AN HOUR ON THIS

[desceros]

for Dredge Au, I thought of this like.. moments before i was about to drift off and legit SHOT UPRIGHT IN BED. What if each of the four turtle brothers were connected to each of the four big landmarks in each corner of the map? here's my thoughts, feel free to shuffle around the brothers

-Leo, Stellar Basin.(Feel like it makes sense considering how at night, stellar basin’s full of bioluminescent coral, jellyfish, etc. Leo could fit right in, esp how in canon his eye marks n stuff glow!!!! I can already see the art of a glowy aberration leo flitting amidst the coral/LH)

-Donnie, Gale Cliffs.( I Don’t have TOO much of a reason, other than that one person who did a fanart of Lavi had her holding a Decaying blackmouth, which is an aberration of a fish found near there. Plus, it just fits, for some reason.)

-Mikey, Twisted Strand. (I feel like maybe he’d be connected to the glowing mushrooms that decorate that area? Since he’s got his li’l spots. Deffo either was friends with the mind lurkers or was like ‘GET OUT OF MY TERRITORY!!!!’ the entire time. No in-between.)

-Raph, Devil’s Spine (Not really that many reasons, but maybe his scales could resemble magma, or He lives off the heat there. Plus all the jagged cliffs/rocks kind of match his spiky design, maybe if someone did fanart they could lean into it.)

Anyways, That's my anonymous word vomit, feel free to toss this ask, I just wanted to share some of my weird midnight lightbulb moments about your AU (I'm devouring it like a man(/gn) deprived btw)

hi hi hi!!! i LOVE that this is haunting you the way it's haunting us 💜 sidebar, "that one person" is gbao3 and is as responsible for the au as i am! all things are better when gb gets involved Confirmed [chin hands]

that's a really cute idea!! the fics haven't really dipped into proper lore yet, but gb and i did come down on the turtles being originally from the stellar basin. for those who haven't played the game, it's a pretty archipelago that has fish that glow at night and is famous for being where you can see an aurora. sooo pretty!! and dangerous. giant kraken in the middle of the ocean dangerous. also it's where a lot of the super deep-water fish are, and we liked leaning into the spookier designs there for the turtles!

BUT!! i do like the idea that they each enjoy different parts of the map! except for donnie, who largely chases fisherman-chan around the map, i suspect leo would have a particular liking for the devil's spine. it's nice and warm, and the buildings are fun to lounge on, and best of all, there aren't any people. well. except that one merchant that comes around from time to time. hm. he should probably do something about that before she gets any ideas about setting up shop permanently.

meanwhile, i think raph would enjoy hanging out around the basin since he really hates being alone and splinter lives in the ruined resort.

as for mikey, i see him spending a lot of time with raph to keep him company... but he also loves going off to hang around People. while donnie is obsessed with One Person (fisherman-chan) and leo distrusts all humans... well. except maybe this one (merchant-chan), mikey is like Wow!! People!! Sparkle Emoji. i could definitely see him getting fished up in nets All The Time, then swimming back home to tell raph about it and getting all huffy when raph gives him a lecture about safety. so i'd probably tie mikey more to the marrows and gale basin, since he likes to go see People.

[dailykeiji]

Can you draw him bald

today's keiji's is: like to slap his bald head reblog to slap his bald head

[daiwild]

can ... can we have some kyle... cause he's just kyle.../ref

He's just Ken Kyle. For real

[pobblebonked]

i concur with the robot anon!! i especially love the couple pieces you did of robo em, they have megaman vibes which is my special interest

where my robot masters at

i need to draw robo em more,,, i really like her design