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No. 48: A rolling droid gathers no Mos

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A rolling droid gathers no Mos

First | Previous | 2015-12-23 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/pomh/?comic=48

Strip by: Ian Boreham

{A movie poster for a Christmas movie. The droid BB-8 from Star Wars 7 is seen in the desert under a blue sky. Perched on his head is a top hat that looks like Darth Vader's helmet.}

caption: If you liked Frosty The Tauntaun...you're going to love Dusty the Sand Droid.

{"Dusty" is written in a somewhat distressed font, and has been cutesified in the manner of kids movie logo text. The hole in the "D" is replaced by a BB-8 coal-black eye, and the prongs of the "Y" have been turned into an arcing droid taser arm. The letters are alternating of-white and orange, like BB-8's colours.}

caption: "There must have been some midichlorians in that old black helmet they found!"

caption: In cinemas this Life Day.

The author writes:

The first thing I thought when I saw BB-8 was "snowman". While drawing the strip, I googled "BB-8 snowman" to see if anyone else had done a comic like this, and found an article saying that JJ had imagined a new droid looking like a snowman and said "Make it so." or something like that. So the basic idea is far from original. I'm slightly suspicious that the idea of a snowman-like robot for a Christmas-release movie may have been inspired by merchandising considerations.

I was taking a bit of a risk doing a strip involving a new Star Wars character when I hadn't even seen the movie yet. I wanted to have some sort of snowman-like arms to increase the Frosty similarity, so I searched around for images of BB-8 with protruberances, The only thing I could find was a picture of a toy with a circular saw arm and what appeared to be a taser arm. I decided that was close enough, and I'd run with it and see if such things actually appeared in the movie later. It will be interesting to see.

Drawn in Krita and Inkscape. I kept thinking I'd missed something, but I couldn't work out what. I just realised now that I missed colouring some orange bits on his head. It's kind of too bad now, since I'm too lazy to fix it and re-upload. Feel free to berate me for not staying true to the source material.