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TheHeroesOfCRASH.com Unfortunately, it wasn’t Rose’s fashion career that would heat up… I like my strip to have a mostly comedic tone, as I quickly get annoyed by an overabundance of drama. That being said, having a little to give my characters some depth is okay in my book. Like many of my favorite cartoons and animated films, there needs to be a balance. Enticia and Belt Boy are both leaders with some personal trauma, but that’s not all they have in common; they both have a little design influence from Digimon! Belt Boy’s goggles are reminiscent of those worn by Tai, Takato, and other Digimon leaders throughout the series, while Enticia’s Heartbreaker emblem is inspired by the broken heart on Rika’s shirt at the beginning of season 3. I’m typically not a fan of retconning, but this was a minor detail that would have annoyed me otherwise: I redesigned the flowerpot in the last panel. Way back in “Even A Rose Has Her Thorns,” the experimental plants that caught fire were in flowerpots that looked more like trash cans. In today’s strip, I updated the pots to have more of a lip, like a traditional flowerpot. If you’ve been enjoying my strip, be sure to share it, and please enter my annual birthday contest!

http://TheHeroesOfCRASH.com Mags gets a turn to try on clothes... no lederhosen this time. Either Rose is having a harder time finding a good outfit for Mags, or she has more fun messing with her than she does with Lana...! Either makes sense; for some reason, groups of friends like teasing the most gullible member of the group (I know this from experience...!). This is the first I've drawn Mags' full body. I found it a bit tricky; full bodies are always more difficult than torsos for me. I also did a lot of tweaks to make sure that she looked plus-size rather than pregnant, most notably giving her a muffin top and thick legs. Her "cute" look was originally going to look more ballerina-like, but I thought putting a kitty on her shirt would be even more nauseatingly cutesy, and the outfit evolved from there. It looks a bit like a frilly apron crossed with a toddler's overalls. Mags' hair clip was originally going to be a skull bow as a nod to Elmyra from Tiny Toons, but I already gave her a bow in the previous panel that seemed fitting, so I just made it a hair clip. I made her fishnets easily; I used a "parallel lines" brush diagonally. My Texan girlfriend might've inspired Mags' cowgirl look a little. Mags was originally going to wear flannel and long jeans, but I didn't want it to look too similar to her lumberjack look in the next panel, so I gave her a denim shirt and ripped her jeans. The lumberjack costume was initially inspired by Monty Python's lumberjack sketch, but I wound up taking a little inspiration from Gravity Falls' Wendy Corduroy, particularly with the shirt being green and worn sloppily. I used the "parallel lines" brush again for the flannel. I've seen treasure map corsets for women's pirate costumes, but I gave Mags a map on her skirt to be less risque (Making sure I didn't put the X anywhere inappropriate). I gave Mags the map skirt and striped headband for another reason; I wanted to make it clear that she was a pirate and not wearing a stereotypical Romany (better known by the less PC term, "g*psy") outfit. Like I said, I wanted to avoid any cultural insensitivity. The final panel with Enticia and Shadowy Sentinel was originally going to be at the end of Lana's montage, but as I was formulating the scripts for these two strips, I thought it made more sense to put it at the end of the second montage.

http://TheHeroesOfCRASH.com Fashion's more fun with sight gags. Lana's less inhibited than Mags (not that that's a high bar to set), so it's no surprise she's willing to go first. She's even willing to look a little silly in an outfit or two. But will that help Mags feel more comfortable? Despite my mom having worked in the fashion industry, I've never been a fan of fashion, myself. I don't see why there needs to be a set of rules for what does and doesn't "look good". I wanna wear my Hawaiian shirts and Ninja Turtle tees more often, dangit! Unsurprisingly, this meant I needed a little outside help to figure out some good outfits for Lana to wear. I googled fashion for her body type, which helped me figure out the three nice outfits in the montage, but I also borrowed elements from outfits I've seen before. Lana's white dress is partly inspired by one of the dresses Tiana wears in The Princess and the Frog, specifically from the "Almost There" dream sequence and Facilier's illusion. In the swimwear panel, her wrap's pattern is inspired by the outfit worn by Lilo from Lilo and Stitch, while the hat may be subconsciously taken from Jessie from Between Failures (See my webcomic links) and/or Connie from the original Steven Universe opening. Her ugly dress was just me trying to do the opposite of her nice dress - there's lots of frills, lines, and colors to contrast with the simplicity of the dress in the previous panel. Lana's snow outfit was given a pink hue and poofball on top, because I wanted it to look like the kind of outfit you put on a five-year-old that makes them incapable of moving in the snow, and NOT like an insensitive caricature of Inuit people. I've used costumes (like sombreros and fruit hats) in much, MUCH earlier strips that would give me pause today, and I certainly don't want to mock a minority's culture in the form of a costume for the sake of a gag. That being said, I'm pretty sure lederhosen is fair game. I believe that I have some German ancestry and I KNOW I'm half-Jewish, so if anyone gets to make fun of German culture, it's me. Of course, fans of the strip would remember that the outfit in the next-to-last panel is that of Battle-Axe Beatrix, the rude, axe-wielding teacher at C.R.A.S.H. I had initially considered other characters' outfits for this gag, but Beatrix's outfit was DESIGNED to look ugly.

TheHeroesOfCRASH.com Given that her mom's a model, is it any wonder Enticia's into fashion? My initial concept behind these friends involved Mags designing the outfits and Enticia (or Rose, since this was before she became a superhero) just being a model like her mom, but I changed my mind. I think I like having all three girls being creative types working together. I also was going to make the Apple-parodying laptop have a pear as a logo, but Nickelodeon called dibs on that already, so we have a Melon computer. Works better in the flashback color scheme anyway.

TheHeroesOfCRASH.com Dodge isn't just a jock; he's also a fashion critic. But Necros can hurl more than dodgeballs and quips...! I'm not sure which I came up with first: Necros or the Necrobots. I honestly wish I could say I remembered how I came up with Necros' design, or why I decided on a skeletal theme, but I don't. However, they do remind me of a previous villain I drew up. When I was in junior high school, I came up with a superhero named Sidney the Mutant Scarab Beetle (I may put some form of him in the comic someday... unless you count a low-detail version of his face appearing on the top-left comic book cover in this strip: http://www.theheroesofcrash.com/2010Strip04-06.htm ). His foe was a mad scientist spider named Dr. Achnid, who had an army of spider-bots. The spider-bots resemebled their creator, much like the Necrobots resemble Necros with their triangular eyes, stripes, and skeletal theme. They used to look a bit more humanoid like Necros, too, until I changed their design to look scarier and more animal-like. The top three panels' backgrounds were initially a bit more sparse. When I saw how dull they looked, I added gradients to the first two panels. I didn't want to add a background, lest it distract from the action, so I used the gradients to bring focus to it instead. The dark edges of panel 3 were the result of me experimenting with a spray-paint tool in my program that I'd never tried before... I liked how it looked, and stuck with it. By the way, if you've been enjoying my comic, why not enter my contest? All you need to do is some artwork or a video game avatar based on my characters, submit them by May 19th, and you'll get some art in return! If your entry is the best, you may get a grand prize! The full rules are at TheHeroesOfCRASH.com, so check them out!