scarygoround

Gardt

Added 2020-08-26 14:58:49 +0000 UTC

I have a special place in my heart for my "awful" characters. Desmond Fishman is the king of awful characters, a terrible green boy in the world. Dean Thompson in Giant Days is another, reprehensible but magnetic in his own way. For By Night, I wanted a character who was a kind of cross between Snarf from Thundercats and the Dungeon Master from the old Dungeons and Dragons cartoon. In my initial sketch of him, which I don't think I showed to anybody (certainly not series artist Christine Larsen), he looked like I'd genetically spliced them both.

Yes, he looks pregnant, but that was because I decided that Gardt would contain the skeleton of his twin, who could talk, and would pop out and cause trouble. Where did this idea come from? The X-Files, I imagine, like all my ideas.

Christine's design of Gardt was far more lovable and probably stopped Gardt from being a true "awful character". She made him soft and enjoyable. His love of the 1980s and his friendship with Chip Meadows only came into focus after I'd seen her design.