redcell6

Anonymous asked:

Hey Doc! I was wondering... were all those rannian species (lizard people, rock people, etc.) created by you for Strange Adventures or do they come from earlier/obscure/silver-age canon?

evandocshaner answered:

Both! Some were created by Tom and I specifically for this book, some were pulled from the original Mystery in Space run, and one was something I came up with and Tom kindly found a place for. I’m going to save the full models in the hope we’ll have a collected edition eventually, but I’ll show some small chunks here. In order of appearance (I think)–

The Pykkt were created by Tom for the book, designed by me.

The Hellotaat were created by Tom and me. I can’t remember what the prompt was because I think they started as a relatively blank slate, but we landed on classic sci-fi Lizard people. Especially after I found out like half of Thanagar is also lizard people.

The Undergrounders were from the original run, created by Fox and Infantino. I asked Tom to include them and did a redesign, introducing the Chieftess, who’s meant to be the daughter of the original Chief appearing in MiS (pictured at left here with the crater in his face).

The Zorra, who we only see one member of in issue #7, were in the original run, created by Fox and Infantino. I wanted to include another people that were visibly humanoid. In the original run they control the Rainbow Tower of Doom and I thought a cool way to reintroduce them would be if they’d spent too much time around the Tower after all the years and had absorbed some of its energy. Tom found a great way to use it in #7.

The Kirri, who just appeared in issue #10, are from the original run. Created by Fox and Infantino and first appearing in Mystery in Space #69. And I think they’ve showed up a few times since but I’m largely pretending that didn’t happen for our book. Another one I asked Tom about including.

The Moorm, of Moorm, are coming up in the next issue (#11) so I won’t say much about them except that (please bear with me here) I had a dream about them and asked Tom if it was anything. As per usual with this book he kindly found a way to make them work for our story.

To be clear about all of these: I was just making suggestions, Tom’s the one who made them all work as a whole and did the hard work of making them serve the story. I wanted to make sure Rann was pretty densely populated and that it wasn’t all Ranagarians. This kind of world-building (hand-in-hand with the map from issue #10) is one of my favorite things and the whole team has been awesome about giving me a little room to really dive in on it.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.