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January 31, 2005
Templar Crapola.
Let's take peek at a few sketches while we wait for Templar to go live, shall we?
For those of you that missed the ten page preview that went up in place of Lucas & Odessa during the holidays, Templar's gonna be one of those comics that's just as much about the setting as about its inhabitants. Templar itself is a fictional city in Arizona, on a river that doesn't exist, and while the world Templar exists in is modern day, it's an "alternate history" sort of modern day.
The best (dorkiest) way I can explain it is that it's a little like that one episode of Sliders where the world is almost exactly the same, except the Golden Gate Bridge is the Azure Gate Bridge, and painted blue. Weird, but not totally foreign. Just not familiar.
Anyway, the fun part of shit like that is all the details. Like these.
Warren Ellis, Quentin Tarantino, and Chris Carter all agree: An alternate reality just isn't sufficiently alternate without its own brand of cigarettes. Templars smoke Buzz Bombs. They're unfiltered, come in chocolate, vanilla bean, citrus, mint, banana, and cognac, and are sold in little, refillable tins. Almost all the smokes sold in Templar are. That never went out of style, there.
As the cut-off text in the corner says, Bolivian food is to Templar what curry is to London. It's just everywhere, and everyone eats it. The Sassy Cavy is a chain. It sells cheese-n-corn wraps, meat patties with boiled eggs in the middle, peanut soup, and, thanks to Templar's weird, overly-specific liquor laws, illegally brewed corn beer.
I had a little too much fun making restaurants for Templar, most of which are shameless wish-fufillment.
The Sassy Cavy's mascot is, sensibly enough, The Sassy Cavy, and one of those creepy food-item-that's-thrilled-to-be-eaten mascots besides. It's a bowl of guinea pig soup. Not a guinea pig; guinea pig soup. It never gets out of the bowl.
A samson... which is a large, finger-to-shoulder piece of plastic armor, and not, despite all appearances, a cybernetic arm... is a required piece of of equipment for Templar's unofficial official sport. Official, becuase everyone plays it or watches it; unofficial, because a while back, in a fit of moralizing, the city banned its play and decreed that players be charged with misdemeanor assault.
It's kinda violent, y'see.
Of course, considering how many teams are made up entirely of sheriff's deputies and highway patrolmen and cops, the law isn't exactly enforced.
The teams have names like Unusually Aggressive Beggar, The Fetus Theives, Souljacker, Inevitable Brady Bunch Incest, and every other vaguely interesting phrase I've ever heard or come up with but couldn't use for anything else. Fun.
Anyway, that's it for now. More later, I guess.
Oh, and be sure to check out the links page, which is once more fit to be seen in public, thanks to del.icio.us and Feedsplitter. Yay!
Posted by Spike at January 31, 2005 07:09 AM
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