Comunicación (Patreon)

It used to be so deep... to me..

Comunicación.

Or

They fly again!

Last September I posted a piece where “Los Niños Viejos” , the WornDown Children’s alter egos from the alternative Mexican universe, or the “Mariachiverso” performed a Serenata for two characters of mine. And for those characters I picked two ocs of mine I hadn't used in a while. (Except not really because I forgot to mention they do a cameo appearance on the background here)

In fact, they're kind of my very first OCs. Kooni and Atzin, the grackles are from my first cringe period (all of them are cringe btw) 

They're from an old “story” that I was “writing” during highschool and it was basically a Río fanfic. (You guys remember Rio? Well I do, and so do the rest of the fandom) So there's two are regular grackles in a human filled world and I had never really adapted them to an anthro world like the ones I regularly used now before so I had fun turning them into characters of old Mexican movie types.

But that was more in order for them to fit the whole Mariachi thing, and I started to think how they would be adapted to Anthros in their own story. And so, to begin the year I decided to tackle that idea. Not completely, if I were to adapt their whole story I'd rather reinvent and come up with a new one because the original one is filled with a bunch of “I'm-fifteen-and-I-think-this-is-deep-isms” (I told you, cringe) but the general idea would look something like this.

First of all, these two would be teenagers and now I imagine them going to different highschools. She goes to a fancy private one and he goes to a regular public one. And they live in Mexico city on the year 1999 (Because I used to think that was deep lol)

The basic idea behind their dynamic Atzin is a girl who has always had problems communicating while Kooni… Well, he’s a yapper. And I’ve always really liked the idea of them meeting by coincidence, so now I like the idea of him going to school during the late shift while she goes in the morning and then meeting right then, while he's arriving and she's going home and them having their conversations during these daily moments. At least at the beginning.

And during the original story Kooni get’s his wing broken and can't really fly for a good chunk of the story he can't fly. For this picture I like to imagine him telling her how he got his arm broken and making it sound cooler than it was.

With communication being a big part of their story I thought it could be fun to have an old public phone in the background and that would also help to date the thing so it does feel like the 90s, so I Wanted to get references from the oldest phone I could find and this ended up with me realizing that almost all of the public phones in my town had been removed and I never noticed. 

I knew exactly where they used to be, and I nailed most of them as the base for a lot of them was still on the ground, but I never noticed when they took them away. 

I get why but it did got me a bit sad, I even posted about it, but with plan A out of the window I went back home and after a ⅔ hour long research I finally had a good enough reference for an old card phone. Even the buttons are accurate.

As for the rest of the background, it is based on a real location in Mexico city where I used to draw these guys all the time. It's a sidewalk next to a park that's actually better looking than the park itself for whatever reason. With fancy street lamps, benches and a lot of palm trees as you can see. 

I used to spend a lot of time there when I skipped classes on highschool. 

One of the coolest things I ever did was deciding to skip a physics course because I didn't like the teacher, present the recuperation exam at the end of the semester and passed it with an 8 anyway like the main character of an anime or something.

You wouldn't know it of course but that also dates the picture as this street doesn't look like this anymore. They changed the lamps but technically better but uglier newer ones and painted the benches white some years ago. It doesn't look bad but it's not the same.

Another thing I Added to the background to date the thing is two cars, one is more of a personal but the beige sturu is the car my dad used to own during that time, and the other one is a VW beetle green cab that used to be all over the city before they were changed to Nissan sturu wine and golden cabs in the middle of the 2000s and to white and pink Nissan kioto cabs in the 2010s. (Enjoy that piece of Mexico city trivia)

Finally, also included are drawings of there on their normal form, it was fun to see how they look on my current style, and the first sketch I did for the redesign that I liked a lot and convinced me to do this.

Happy New Year! Everyone! 

The comic posting will resume soon.