RYAN & DONNY'S HALF-ASSED SUBSTACK PODCAST | episode 3

On VANISH character designs! Yippeee!

The internet’s favorite podcast is back with another great installment! This episode, Ryan and Donny discuss the inspiration and character designs for Oliver Harrison, Battle Rocket, and Baron Vanish! Check it out below.

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Donny Cates: Hey everybody, welcome to Ryan and Donny's Half-Assed Substack Podcast! Today, hot off the heels of last week's incredible drop- we dropped the first seven pages of VANISH- you guys can kind of get a little bit more of a glimpse into what it is exactly the hell that Ryan and I are doing over here. We want to take a second and, first of all, say thank you so much to all of our subscribers who have stuck in there and are finally, I hope, starting to get a sense of just how much rad shit we're gonna bring you and, talking about that rad shit, we wanted to take a second and talk about these character designs. You know, what was it Ryan, like last year that I came out there?

Ryan Stegman: When was that? What month was that? I don't even remember now.

Donny Cates: It was last year, though, right? It wasn't this year. What was it? Was it this year?

Ryan Stegman: I think it was after January? Well, that's a good question. I don't remember.

Donny Cates: It wasn't cold.

Ryan Stegman: I think it was post-January.

Donny Cates: It might have been two months ago. Time means nothing. Well, Ryan and I, we work really well when we're together, when we're in the same room. And that's something that we kind of learned and built from going to our Venom summit, our Absolute Carnage summit, our King in Black summit. And so whenever the hell, a little earlier this year, something like that, I flew out to Troy, where Ryan lives, and we sat in a basement for the better part of like, nine days or some kind of crap, and we broke down all of VANISH- the entire beginning, middle, end, and broke it all out. One of the key things that we spent all that time doing was character designs and that's what we're gonna be talking to you about today, specifically, the three characters that you've really seen a lot of. Now there's a lot more where that came from, and you're gonna get like sneak peeks into those as we go along. But right now we're going to be really focusing on three: our main character, Oliver, a character named Battle Rocket, and then our big big bad guy himself, named Baron Vanish. Ryan, what do you remember about the character breakdowns and stuff like that? How did it start?

Ryan Stegman: Well, we definitely did not have... Battle Rocket was fairly easy to get out of me. I remember that. Like, we kind of had ideas right out of the gate. Baron Vanish, if you remember when you left, we were like, "is he a fat guy? What is he gonna be?" So, I do remember that one was a little harder to come by. But Battle Rocket again, I could just see him in my head as soon as we started talking about him. We knew it was gonna be a kid. We knew that he was gonna have a manga influence.

Donny Cates: Yes.

Battle Rocket!!!

Ryan Stegman: He's selling a persona. And so that that was kind of the direction that we went with that. And then Baron Vanish, I mean, the spider legs didn't even come about until-

Donny Cates: After I left.

Ryan Stegman: Yeah, we didn't have him right until I was about to draw him, actually. I had to stop the book for a little bit, and then go and figure him out.

Donny Cates: Yeah, I think Baron Vanish was the one that we kind of himmed and hawwed, and went back and forth over the most. In an upcoming post, we will probably post a lot of those early designs, and we have a lot of them.

Ryan Stegman: They're sitting right here on my desk. I did a lot of them very quickly.

Donny Cates: Yeah, we have a ton of them. Baron Vanish, especially, because obviously the book is kind of named after him. Right? The book's title has a lot more meaning than just our bad guy being called Baron Vanish. Baron Vanish, now that you guys have seen those seven pages- and if you haven't seen those, you can see them, they're behind a paywall, and you can just subscribe. There's a whole lot of different tiers. But really, if you're a paying, you know, substacker? (Is that what we can call them?) Then you will have already seen that. But you know, Baron is just kind of our big bad of the series in a lot of ways. But in a very unexpected way, in a way that I don't think you're going to see coming, which kind of makes it difficult for us to talk about a lot of these characters because, as we've said in podcasts before, a lot of what VANISH is doing is very much a magic trick right in front of your face. So nothing is as it seems, which if you've seen those seven pages, again, you'll kind of see that the book opens up with a very familiar trope that Ryan I like to do, which is a guy who's kind of fucked up in an alleyway. It's raining and stuff like that. We did that on purpose, right? To kind of make you be like, "oh, Donny and Ryan are kind of back on their shit, this is kind of familiar." But then things take a hard left turn with this crazy superhero. And then things take a crazier right turn, where Oliver takes us into his origin of where he comes from. And he does not come from our world. He comes from a world of magic, a world of sorcerers and warlocks and everything, and how exactly that has to do with the superhero team, with Oliver, with all these things. It's something that we're going to be unveiling over time. The thing that was a big challenge to us with Baron Vanish is that Ryan and I, we're known for a lot of things, chief among them, I think, is our Venom run, but even bigger within that is the character of Knull. I think that every single time that we tried to sit down and draw- because I would draw like dumb little pictures too, to try and show Ryan what I was thinking- every single time that we came up with an idea that we kind of liked for Vanish, we would look at it and go, "no, that's too much like Knull." Ryan and I, we get along so well because we have a similar aesthetic. For me, the reason that Knull was always so scary was that he's not ripped and huge like Thanos or Darkseid or anything. He's a thinking-man's sadist, you know? He's elegant and these kinds of things. And well, we tried to do the complete opposite of it, like Ryan said, we were like, "what if he was like a big fat guy, like a huge conquering warrior who's like an old fat king?"

Ryan Stegman: That was exactly the direction we were going.

Donny Cates: Yeah, and then I think that we got to a place where we were like- not that we stole Knull's design, because we obviously didn't- but we got to a place where we were like, "you know what, screw it." This is the kind of stuff that we like. We like these elongated, long arms, very creepy, almost like Slender Man kind of silhouettes. Baron Vanish, obviously, is a sorcerer. He has great issues with the magic school that Oliver grew up in and, more than that, the headmaster of that school. They have differing ideologies, about this race of magical beings, what their larger place in the world should be, right?

Ryan Stegman: Kind of sounds like Magneto.

Donny Cates: Exactly, that's what I was thinking! He very much has an X-Men vibe. An X-Men vibe and nothing else. What's really cool about VANISH is that we got to a place with him where you could, you can absolutely see where he's coming from, which is the best kind of bad guy. Once we get along a little bit more into the previews and stuff and you kind of get to see what his whole thing is. He makes some solid points. He goes about them the wrong way. In those seven pages, you see that Oliver has a sigil that is burned into his shoulder. And it burns and gets brighter when he's in the presence of some sort of danger or some sort of whatever it is, right? And if you look closely at that drawing, you'll see it that that sigil is of a raven and that raven is the symbol for the house that he was in at his magical school. And every one of the houses has a different animal and stuff and we definitely get the inclination from Baron Vanish, if you've seen the drawings, is that he obviously has an allegiance of his own: that of a spider. Ryan, where'd that come from? Because it kind of came out of the blue. You sent me that drawing. It's really cool because, when you see Vanish, you can't tell that he's a spider, right? He just looks like he has these fasteners over his chest and on his ribs. It's not until he goes into an attack mode or just wants to present himself as dangerous that he kind of blooms out.

Ryan Stegman: Essentially, what happened was I kept doing designs, and we kept saying, "there's no signature here for it." I was trying to think of an animal sigil for Baron Vanish and it just kind of happened organically from there, where he suddenly had the legs coming over him, and so on. That design took me, I don't know, two or three days, I remember it really clearly. I kept doing it and being like, "no, this needs something, this needs something special about it." Of course, I'm thinking the whole time about how a toy would look. And finally, the legs and all that stuff just kind of came together. And then it was like, "oh, and then it could also bloom out over him when he's trying to be intimidating." And I drew those little sketches and it just made sense.

VANISH #1 Substack Exclusive variant cover by Daniel Warren Johnson!

Donny Cates: Creators, especially artists, always really talk about the silhouette of a character. All the best characters in Marvel and DC or even beyond that, you know, you see a silhouette of a guy web swinging in a crazy pose, you know that's Spider-Man. Batman has the ears and everything. That's something that we tried to really keep in mind going through these things. We showed off that variant from Daniel Warren Johnson, and Baron Vanish is completely in silhouette in the back, and you know immediately that that's him. And you also know immediately that's a bad dude. That's not a cool dude, you know? I want to point out too that there are aesthetic overlaps, that are very intentional, that you'll begin to see as these things go on. One of the biggest ones for us, this will kind of take us going into Oliver, is the smoke pouring from the eyes. That was, I believe, I think one of our first things that we ever talked about. Silhouette wise, as this guy moves and stuff, that smoke will be trailing off and always burning and always coming from him.

Ryan Stegman: And it's coming from the center, because normally in comics, we always do off the sides.

VANISH #1 standard cover by Ryan Stegman!

Donny Cates: We were talking about how a cigarette burns. Like when you hold it and then when you move it around it creates little zigzags in the air. And so you'll see, as the book goes on, that that's something that Baron Vanish has. Baron Vanish has those same kind of eyes that burn. Then you'll start to see that Oliver, he has that as well. And it's a signifier of kind of world building stuff that you'll begin to see as it goes on. Other people's powers manifest themselves in different ways. I don't mind, unless you do Ryan, spoiling exactly what Oliver's costume and what we're looking at when we're looking at his costume. Or do you want to hold off on that?

Ryan Stegman: That's probably fine, right? Because the next scene that they see will have that. So... you might just want to save that just because we can talk about that in another episode.

Donny Cates: Okay, we'll save that for sure. Suffice to say that all of the components that make up Oliver's costume are things that he very much made himself. And that was one of the things that Ryan and I went back and forth on a lot. Ryan had a lot of designs that were very sleek, very sophisticated, like these big gauntlets and stuff like that. I don't recall all we had, and I kept on pushing back to you and I was like, "hey, look, this is a dude who's out of his fucking mind." This is a guy who has lost his entire childhood and is on a lot of medications and is an alcoholic. This costume, it needs to look like something that he went and made in a fit of blackout rage in his basement, just to be able to go out and hurt people and have people not know who he is. I think that we found a really great balance between it because, it does look menacing. It does look frightening, but it also looks unclean. It looks not particularly balanced or even well put together. What you're looking at on his mouth, like how his collar comes up here, what you're looking at, right, there are very poorly done stitches.

Ryan Stegman: Probably just done with a shoelace.

Donny Cates: Yeah, sincerely. And underneath it he is just wearing a long black shirt and a pair of jeans and some Docs, right?

Ryan Stegman: Yeah. Just his clothes.

Donny Cates: Yeah. Which is very much like- The Crow obviously is a big influence on his look. You haven't really seen him manifest his power set yet, so we'll wait on that to get to that, but there's these talismans that everyone who came from that world and went to that school, they all have. And it allows them to kind of wield and choose their magical abilities in some pretty unique ways. Did you have anything else you wanted to say about Oliver?

Ryan Stegman: People will say like, "oh, it looks like such and such and such and such." And I am actually always happy about that, because it means that we've kind of hit on something that is universal. I think that he's going to end up being the character that you think of when you see this type of thing. We definitely wanted to have some sort of mask. We had to find something, an iconic look, and I think that we finally landed on one. That one was interesting. I feel like I was starting out and I just had no idea. It would be these weird masks and I'd just be like, "I don't know, how about this?" And then we settled on the cape idea and that really brought it together. There's just been a lot of people telling me how much fun he looks like to draw. And to them, I say: DO IT, send it now. Maybe we'll do like fan art on the Substack. I'd love to see more.

Donny Cates: Well, that'd be a great idea. We could do like a Fan Art Friday or something like that.

Ryan Stegman: That is a good idea. Write that down, Supples.

Donny Cates: Yeah. Honestly, that was really surprising to me, how much fan art started coming in right away just from the designs and the cover and everything. People were drawing this character, they don't have any idea who he is, or what his whole deal is. And I'm kind of keeping track of Twitter as we're recording this because those seven pages- the day that we're recording this is the day that we put out VANISH pages one through seven. So I'm looking at the response to it right now, people are really enjoying it. So thank you guys, and as this thing starts to go along, and as we're able to reveal more information, these character designs will get a little bit more in depth. Just to kind of round us off here, really quick, Battle Rocket was one of the easiest for us because, I think we had these moments that you chase when you're writing, and they can be small, they could be huge, or whatever. But I loved the idea of this young Robin-esque, manga-inspired character dropping down, beating the shit out of these guys and then smoking a cigarette. This 10-year-old boy being like, "fucking-A man. That was fucking awesome." I had that in my head. And so I think for that joke to work, we pushed Battle Rocket's design as hard as we could into like, fun, Power Pack, stuff like that, you know? I think it all really came together. Now, once again, Battle Rocket, just like every character in this book, there's more where that came from and there's more than meets the eye, especially with Battle Rocket in the first issue. You're going to get a glimpse at what you're actually looking at because, in the world of VANISH, not all is as it seems. That about wraps it up for us this time guys. Thank you for coming by and there's more to come!

Kids Love Chains. And we love you. 

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