As you can see, there have been plenty of revisions over the years. This is partly due to the changing nature of Moon Town. It started off as sort of a tribute to the cool TV shows of the late 50s and early 60s – Rocketship XM, Thunderbirds, etc. At one point, it was really dark, sort of Blade Runner, future noir (sketches on this to come). And in the back of my head is Marc Craste and StudioAKA pinging at me to Keep It Simple, so you’ll occasionally see little capsule-shaped characters with just a circle for a face.
But here you can also begin to see the design turning toward his new incarnation, a miner named Melvin. I thought it might be interesting to see one of these stories of interstellar intrigue not from the point of view of the Super Cool Flying Aces, but from someone like a miner or a space truck driver. That’s where the story is going, anyway, and you can see the sketches turning that way. Or at least I can. Maybe you had to be there at the time? But there are pages and pages of sketches featuring this sort of schizophrenic design where sometimes it’s Ace, and sometimes it’s Melvin. *shrug* At some point they diverged and I was the last to know.
Also hidden amongst the many characters here is another character, a mechanic named Jimmy. Can you guess which sketch he is?
