[SUMMARY: The tale of Man-Shrimp's struggle to LIVE shifts its focus to the coast of Japan and introduces a new character: Keisuke, a retired ramen chef.]
Still some crudity (I think my artwork will always have a certain crude aspect to it), but this is one of my favorite pages!
It is the beginning of Chapter 2, "Keisuke and Masao and...", and is also the beginning of an experimental stage for me. Here, I started to get a little bit loose with my brush strokes. Aspiring to the style of Asian watercolor paintings.
I even did most of the panel borders with three curvy strokes each.
Keisuke was originally going to be a sushi chef, but a friend of mine started talking about ramen in an email thread, and it inspired me.
I created Keisuke's look from a caricature of a sushi chef who works down the street. He also wears a green baseball cap.
He doesn't look quite old enough in Panel 2 (challenge: How to make a character look old without drawing a zillion wrinkles), and he looks like Leonard Nimoy in Panel 3, but by the end I think I had gotten a good grasp on the linework that defines him.
The result of a freak accident which conjoined shrimp fisherman Les Clay with thousands of netted shrimp, forming them into one unique being, the Delectable Man-Shrimp has long been a champion of the watery world. However, the tides have changed in recent years. An ancient evil has taken hold of the ocean's depths. Man-Shrimp's friends and allies have died or vanished, leaving our diminutive hero to languish at the bottom of the sea. Will he rise up and meet the challenges that lie ahead?
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