VEAL Blog

So as you may or may not have guessed by now – there are aliens in my story. In fact the majority of the characters you’ll get to know as the webstrip begins will almost ALL be of an alien species. And as fun as that sounds – there are downsides for me.

#1 - make a multitude of alien species that I can use without risk of copyright infringement.

#2 – making a multitude of alien species I think are interesting and can draw week after week.

#3 – trying to do something other than the classic “bumpy forehead” aliens or something similar where everyone looks humanoid for no real reason (other than actors with latex appliances on their faces).

So I sat down and started to ponder quite a few of the races I wanted to use and sure enough - a lot of them look very humanoid. I started thinking outside of the box, wondering where I could go that might prove to be interesting. Then one night – I’m watching Hellboy 2 and I noticed the character of Kraus. A german chracter who is made up of some whispy looking smoke.

I thought to myself – wow – that’s a wild idea. An intelligent cloud of gas…it sounds funny but also just weird enough that it could work. I mean – really – who’s to say there aren’t self aware clouds out there right?

Set on my task – I started to come up with ideas for how they could look, and I came up with the idea that the species (known as the Hadlock) would come from a planet with an atmosphere that can widely vary depending on the location. One unified link would connect them all though – because the atmosphere is generally too dense – the Hadlock had to move between the gases and in fact had to BE gas in order to survive in these extreme conditions.

As they evolved and left their world – they needed suits that could allow them to survive in atmospheres far less dense than their own but could adjust as needed since they were so sensitive to the external pressures of various planets. The end result is a very baggy hyper redundant self locking suit that can inflate and deflate as to the Hadlock’s needs. In low atmospheres – the suit would expand – adding pressue to keep the Hadlock comfortable and in high pressure atmospheres it would be extremley baggy – almost to the point of silly.

While finishing this idea – I also though that it would be neat that when the Hadlock do wander around in their natural hard atmosphere gas states – that they would use what we percieve as arms as a second set of legs. While they can walk around and almost be completely solid to our standards, they find the use of an extra set of limbs for moving around very freeing. As such they typically have very long arms that can touch the ground. Take a look – and let me know what you think!

- Shaun

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