Micah, Jason, and I have been talking recently about which Rapid City characters could be spun into their own stories and books. I am proud to say that almost every character who is present enough to have a look and a name also has enough dimension and depth that they could hold up in at least one story of their own.

Hector is like that. Especially with the back story we have worked out for him. How much continued interest could we sustain, though, in a character who earns his living by beating up superheroes and supervillains? That’s his thing, that is what he does.

With his elite commando training, he sees superpowers as liabilities rather than assets. To him, every ability is matched by a vulnerability.

He is probably the character I would least like to meet and speak to in real life, but one of the most fun to write.

I am already looking forward to figuring out where he is going to wind up after our first few Rapid City stories have run their course.

Josh Dahl

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Hector, one total bad### and one of my favorites.

Enjoy.

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Almost all of the major characters in Rapid City are based on people I know. Some are based on individuals, and some are based on more general ‘types’ of people.

I knew I needed a character to be positive and energetic, and also an unexpected source of wisdom. As an inside joke on one of the people this character was going to be based on, I wanted to call him something monkey related. “The Monkey” perhaps.

But it wasn’t working just right. It wasn’t coming together.

So, I put it on the back burner and thought about other aspects of Rapid City. Looking at my cast of characters, I realized that I needed to get a few more of them up off the ground. For visual reasons, I needed to draw the reader’s eye up into the sky.

Flying, swinging, leaping, something like that.

Then it hit me. That high-energy positivity I was looking for…that frenetic pro-activity…it is just like pop-punk. In fact, just like a lot of the pop-punk bands I was listening to in the days that I am actually writing about in Rapid City. Pop-punk bands withy names like “Bounder”.

So many things have just come together perfectly on this project. It is a neat kind of synergy that really makes me feel like we are on the right track.

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So I’ve been revisiting some of the characters that I wasn’t quite sure on their look. Something was off to me and so I’m tweaking them. So here’s Bounder. Slight revision to his look.

Enjoy.

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When people flip through Rapid City sketch books one of the characters they always seem to ask about is Spade.

He is one of my favorites as well. Spade is the caretaker of the grounds where secrets are buried. Some secrets just need a symbolic, psychological, burial. For others, however, someone needs to get a shovel and put them down in the dirt. That’s what Spade does.

Whose secrets is he keeping, and from whom?

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It’s been a while since I’ve drawn Spade. He’s probably one of the more mysterious characters of Rapid City and one of my favorites to draw. So here’s a new one.

Enjoy.

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Seems like there is some kind of new-age, PC, re-thinking of the werewolf. They have gone from monster to nature spirit, like man and nature harmoniously intermingled.

That does not describe our wolves at all. They are bad. Bad dogs, bad people, and bad monsters.

So, maybe ours actually is closer to that new vision. I mean, when have you ever seen mankind mix with nature when nature has not been seriously messed up.

That’s what our version is, not a noble woodland spirit, but the power and savagery of nature polluted by the petty barbarism and stupidity of mankind.

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