Week 45! (Patreon)

So if you go back and read the Old Canon through again, it turns out there's not actually that many characters in it that are really important. The group of friends was only limited to the main four of Kale, Bruce, Campy, and Ashley, with Bruce getting the most focus. You had your antagonists in Lupin, Gus, and Felicia, you had teachers and Kale's family... and that was pretty much it besides background characters. I figured there was a lot more, but I guess not.

So for this last entry in the Old Canon, here's Gus's older design, specifically in his fur coat pattern. It was definitely more distinct and comparatively simpler to Gus's pattern in the New Canon, mostly since he had giant, easily-distinguished patches of a certain fur color rather than random splotches of black and brown on a mainly-white coat. This was changed when I started the New Canon mostly because I felt like the black fur around his muzzle looked kind of off and weird, and I also wanted the splotches to be smaller, less like giant, separated patches, and more random and integrated with each other like a real calico's.

Some other random info on Gus you may or may not know: I don't remember if I knew that calicos were almost always a female-only thing for cats when I created Gus... probably not. But the rationale I retroactively came up with has always been that he's a chimera, in that he has the cells of an absorbed twin inside of him that allows him to have the necessary gene markers for the three fur colors that usually can only happen on female cats. It was either that or make him infertile with an extra X-chromosome, and I didn't want to get into something like that, so chimera it was for anyone who asked.

Also, Gus was my very first instance/character to indulge in something more "adult", with a punchline in one of the last Old Canon comics being Gus wondering if Ashley owned handcuffs, which was a mild BDSM reference. This was a really big thing at the time, since I had been really clean up until that point with almost everything I'd done comic-wise, with only the relationship between certain characters in my old comic DATAROM! being even remotely close by alluding to regular normal sex once or twice very vaguely. It would eventually evolve pretty quickly in the New Canon with introduced sexualities for every character and non-straight relationships and interests here and there.

For the next series of drawings, I've been considering revisiting some of the Randomly-Generated characters. Not all of them, because most of them are boring or only appeared in one panel or something, but maybe some of the more notable/interesting ones.