Making of "Infiltrated"

I've taken part in The Outliners event for 3 years and every year I both love and dread it!  It's fun to play with a superhero trope, but it's SO HARD to cram it all into one comic that I can get done on time.  I had a bunch of ideas this year, but they are basically full animated Justice League episodes!  

I had a whole comic thought out about Pyramid Head Scheme, but I knew she was an extremely strange crossing of genres.  I mean, how many people would actually appreciate multi-level marketing AND Pyramid Head jokes? 😅

With the deadline looming, I considered going to my fallback position of posting a bunch of parent-orientated supervillain concepts.  Then J had a eureka moment of turning that into a comic!  Some sort of disaster occurs and they run through their rogues gallery to find a suspect, only to reveal at the end it was the kids all along!  Perfectly doable!

I brainstormed some potential villains with friends and shortlisted to the ones above.  

I wanted Pyramid Head Scheme to have a gold/money/temptress vibe, so I made her a weird gender bend cross between Pyramid Head and Dr Fate.  

Santimommy had to be breastfeeding and covered in horrible kids, so a possum was the obvious choice.  At first she had a tote bag of organic groceries, but it was making her seem too ordinary.  

The Decafinator is basically just a Mumra sloth!

I love Pinterest, but often find it tricks me into crafting projects that are a lot harder, messier and more expensive than they seem.  I made Pinteresa an octopus wielding a bunch of craft supplies. 

For the story, my first thought was that the kids had stolen Edgelord's cape to build a blanket fort.  It would have been a little hard to make it absolutely clear it was his cape in the final reveal though.  J suggested having them wreck the hideout instead and then have Tantrum "drawing" cute things on the wall in the end.  I didn't want to give up on the visual of Edgelord standing around in his underwear, so I combined the 2 ideas.  

In the first sketch I had Mommy Brain gesturing to the trashed computer, but realized that might take some of the sting out of the "to the crime computer!" joke if they were only using Google because their real crime computer was broken.

I used these reference pictures of the Batcave for the background:

I liked the idea of amping up the excitement just to have something mundane happen.  For the transition panel I was going to have it say EXCITING, but J suggested their heads instead.  I worried that people might not get what it was supposed to be and briefly considered trying to animate it.  Fortunately time constraints stopped me because it sounds like everyone understood and even HEARD the panel properly! :)

Pyramid head Scheme still wasn't any obvious animal, so I gave her a very on brand reptilian tail.

Pinteresta was looking a bit meh, so I combined her with another idea of a Godzilla-esk "To-Do List Monster".  Once she was sized up, the weapons looked weird, so I removed them and gave her a monster mouth to blast glitter breath instead.

For true authenticity, I used this picture for Edgelord and Mommy Brains final pose! :)

That's a wrap for another year! (Whew!)