XoverLover

Alex Z. Manson sketches. Not very used to the style I picked for the originals, so much practice is needed.

This keeps getting further and further away from the original redesigning goal. I mean, this time, the only thing that was kept about the character was “stranded on an island, gone nutty”. But then again, I can’t really remember anything else that character was known for. Dx

Well, if I do any further redesigns or go somewhere else with this story, I won’t tag it as part of a redesign of TP’s characters anymore. I’m pretty sure it’s gone way beyond being any sort of recognizable parody or re-make of his daily-gag-comic.

Taisiya, the Hag

When Alex told Atlas he wanted to stop by the uncharted island just ahead, all he got was a funny look and the simple statement that there was no island anywhere near them. Telling Uncle Peisly got similar results, and no matter how he threatened, Sammy assured him they weren’t trying to pull one on him. So Alex had no option but to stick their arses on a small boat, and lead them to the island that was very clearly there. And they still didn’t acknowledge the island being there until they set foot on its shore.

According to Uncle Peisly, the island had to be cursed, and they should leave immediately. Alex refused to believe in such witchery, being of the mind his crew just wanted to make fun of him, and insisted they explore the island.

And that’s how they came across an old woman by the name of Taisiya.

The eldery woman had been stranded on the island for over three decades, so her sanity was understandably damaged. With a constant flickering of her left eye and her self-directed mutters and laughter, Alex reconsidered his thoughts about exploring the island. The captain wanted to leave the woman behind, because an insane old woman wouldn’t be anything but a burden in the ship; and Sammy was freaked out enough by the old woman to agree. Atlas did not want to leave her alone on the island, though, and Uncle Peisly agreed with him for once.

So Taisiya was the second woman to join their crew.

While the woman had her moments of clarity and more than a handful of wisdom to pass on, Taisiya’s unstable character more often hinders Alex’s travels. She freaks out most of the crew, but no matter how many times Alex tries to lock her in the storage rooms, she always finds her way out somehow.

Taisiya is a strange woman, but she behaves more or less the same with everyone, except for Alex. In her delusions, she will often seem to confuse Alex with a lover she once had, while other times she’ll mother him instead. Alex assumed these were just particularly bad lapses of insanity… well, until he heard her utter the name of Zacharias Manson.

It was no use trying to ask about his father, though, given how fragmented the woman’s memories were. So, still looking for his father’s treasure, Alex has to wonder: had Taisiya really known his father? Why was she stranded in that island for over thirty years? And most important of all, why had Alex been the only one able to see said island?

And I keep doing this. It’s actually kind of fun, you know. I might just switch up the names, drop half the references to the characters I’m ‘redesigning’, and just try to someday tackle this as a story of its own. I certainly keep on adding little twists and turns to it.

It’s a bit funny how redesigning these characters is what’s getting me to try out a style other than cookie-cutter anime for some characters. Odd. I suppose I’ve got Mr. Dobson to thank for that, though I’d been meaning to do it for a while now.

Uncle Peisly did not get genderbent, unlike the main three characters, because… well, just because. I thought h was fine with that gender, and since the redesigning gives almost no hint of who this could be if someone doesn’t know the characters being redesigned, it’s fine as it is.

Uncle Peisly

He arrived to Alex’s hometown to tell him two things: first, his father was dead; second, he was in possession of a map that would lead them both to riches.

Peisly Manson is a seasoned man of adventure, and despite his stocky appearance, can really hold his own in a fight. He will only show his talents when his life is in danger, though: most of the time, his prime interests are booze and beautiful women. A survivalist, he believes that the most important thing in life is self-preservation, and will not hesitate to betray or back-stab someone to get ahead in life.

The only person he will stick his neck out for is his nephew, Alex. Despite only having met him when the lad was already twenty two, Peisly will often go out of his way to protect and teach Alex the ways of piracy. Alex sees him as a substitute of sorts to his own father, who he never got to meet.

Despite his outward cheery and careless behavior, and his affection for Alex, Uncle Peisly doesn’t get along with Atlas. The dislike is mutual, although both of them are very good at being passive-aggressive about it. Uncle Peisly maintains that Atlas is a bad influence for Alex’s pirating life, while Atlas argues Uncle Peisly is a bad influence for Alex as a human being. Sammy will often act as buffer between them.

There we go, got the final lines and flats down. Might actually try to shade it, if only to practice shading, but probably not in a while. So, let’s see.

Alexander Zacharias Manson

Alex is the son of The Fearsome Pirate Manson and Joanne Brown, who just happened to be one of the man’s many lovers in land. Zacharias Manson was not a good man by any means, but Alex still grew hearing nothing but praise for him and his lifestyle from his star-struck mother: the life of a pirate, full of adventure and treasures, was always something to desire.Which is understandable when you’re scrapping just to get by every week.

So as Alex grew up struggling in the low end of society, he wanted nothing more than to become a pirate. As a child, he had been hopeful his father would return and take him along on his adventures, but eventually realized the man might not even know he had a son. So if he wanted to be a pirate, it would have to be on his own merits. He learned how to wield a sword and paid whoever would teach him how to read sea charts or manage a ship, and if there was just enough extra gold at the end of the month, he’d spend it in the bar, drunkenly convincing anyone willing to lend an ear about how he’d become the greatest Pirate Captain known to mankind.

It was sometime after Alexander’s twenty-second birthday that a rugged sailor showed up at the bar, introducing himself as Peisly Manson, brother to Pirate Mason, and Alex’s uncle. And he came bearing both good and bad news.

The bad news, Zacharias Manson was dead. And there died any hopes of meeting and being acknowledged by the man who’d fathered him.

The good news, Uncle Peisly had managed to escape the raid that killed Zacharias in possession of the pirate’s treasure map. A treasure map said to lead to riches worthy of a King.

That was all the incentive he needed. He only had a modest boat, the bar’s drunkards and lowlifes as crew, and Uncle Peisly’s knowledge of the seas on his side. But it was a start.

Wind on his sails and treasure map in hand, Alex had just taken his first step towards becoming a renowned pirate.

Given his lean-to-lithe build, and because he’s not as ruthless as many of the men in his crew, he is often accused of thinking and acting like a girl by his men, though this is not really the case. When ashore, though, this teasing/mocking from his less loyal crewmen causes confusion among the townsfolk. Very often, they’ll assume Alex is indeed a female pirate, though it tends to get cleared up as soon as they hear him talk or when they’re not seeing him from behind.

Atlas

Alex came to realize, very soon, that having only drunks and lowly criminals as your crew was not the best of ideas. They fit the role of pirates perfectly, but at the least hint of witness, he’d find his position as the ship’s Captain questioned by the roughest of his men. Some of them easily dwarfed him, but he would always come on top during fights, for his agility and skills with the sword.

Intimidation could only go so far, though, and soon he found himself giving them more freedom in land and allowing them larger parts of their booty, against Uncle Peisly’s advice. He knew they’d gotten a bit too comfortable with themselves when they began plundering heedlessly in the ports they arrived to, beating up women and stealing even from children. Despite his desire to be a renowned pirate, Alex found he disagreed with this behavior.

He made his disapproval known to the group of hooligans when he stopped them from killing a woman for not serving them the drinks they were asking for. Unfortunately, he’d decided to confront them while he was one against five, and without his sword nearby.

The end of Alex’s tale would have been very grim, if it hadn’t been for Atlas.

Having seen Alex protecting an innocent woman, the brick-wall of a man had stood to fight alongside the runty pirate captain. They won, though not without a fair amount of bruises. On the upside, Atlas decided to assign himself as part of Alex’s crew.

The dark-skinned man is arguably the most useful and capable member of Alex’s crew, considering the man claimed to have never set foot on a boat before. A dependable man and a great fighter, he easily became Alex’s right hand, and unwitting moral compass. Although he doesn’t mind plundering from those he deems deserving of it, he’ll question the need to attack the defenseless, which in turn makes Alex question the morality and reason behind his actions.

As a side note, Atlas is homosexual. But that has little to no importance in the story, because he doesn’t go around molesting straight men or flaunting ze gayness.

Sammy, the Orphan

After months of traveling in search for his father’s treasure, Alex’s name was finally beginning to spread. He was not known as Pirate Manson, though, but simply as “Captain Alex,” which he supposed was good enough. These things took time, after all, and it was always flattering to hear the whispers on the street. And while a lot of people had heard of him, few knew what he looked like, so he could pass by mostly undetected and hear the rumors first-hand.

Indulging in this ego-stroking hobby of his was how he found out that Captain Alex had attempted to rob several establishments in town already.

Funny, Alex had thought, because that was the first time he’d been to this particular town.

A quick relying of events had him and Atlas hunting around town for details on the Captain’s whereabouts. Rumors were of little help, but somehow they managed to locate the ‘Captain’ in a middle-class restaurant that night. A high-pitched cry declaring the Captain’s presence and the flashing of a sword was all needed for the restaurant to break into chaos. Managing not to be trampled, Alex somehow managed to pin down the culprit, who was trying to pick up valuables left behind by the fleeing clients.

Not only was the culprit’s attempt at looking like Alex a total failure, it wasn’t even a man. Who Alex had pinned down was, in fact, a blonde girl with a laughable pirate get-up and a cloth-mask to poorly mask her identity. The authorities, who had been already on alert because of the previous robberies, gave the girl the perfect opening to escape.

It was only by pure luck that he found her again, the next day, at the Marketplace. He recognized her eyes and hair at once, and tried to confront her. Once more, she escaped, but a patron of a nearby stand told him all he needed to know about her. Her name was Sammy, and she lived in a nearby orphanage. He set out with Atlas, eager to give the wench a lesson about impersonating him. He changed his mind when he saw the building’s conditions.

With several hungry mouths to feed and not nearly enough hands to help, the orphanage couldn’t get any poorer. Atlas was the first to realize, Sam must have been stealing to aid the orphanage, and using Alex’s name for her deeds was probably the only way she could think of doing it.

Disappointed and oddly grim, Alex was ready to leave the town without extracting any sort of revenge. Before they could leave, though, they had one more encounter with Sammy. This time, she was about to get beaten-up by a group of angry men that had recognized her ruse for what it was. While she had managed to get away from Alex twice with pure luck alone, she wasn’t nearly as lucky against these men. Alex and Atlas had no choice but to fight the men off her. Then, Alex proceeded to chew out the girl about her foolish choices, telling her not to get into trouble she had no chance of escaping. He finished by stating the fact that she could no longer stay in town, because more people would realize what she’d done.

He hadn’t meant it as an invitation for her to join his crew, but she sneaked into the ship all the same.

Alex’s decision to let Sammy stay as part of the crew, followed by the rule that she would not be treated any less than a male member of the ship, was met with a few more of his original crewmen leaving his side.

Initially, Sammy could only take care of things like cleaning the ship and other such chores: she was no good at sewing, and no good at cooking, either. Alex eventually agreed to teach her to fight with a sword, though, so she could help with plundering and send more money back home.

Sammy is only seventeen, and is often mistaken for Alex’s woman, although they have no romantic interest for each other. If anything, their relationship is akin to that of brother and sister.

I saw someone in tumblr comment about how they thought taking a certain unable-to-take-criticism person’s characters and re-designing them into something decent was a good exercise. The idea stuck with me, so here’s some rough sketches I did today.

When I re-design characters, though, I always tend to genderbend them, which ended up with these three: Sammy (left), Alexander Z. Manson (middle), and Atlas (right).

Unfortunately, I can never just re-design and be happy with it, so now I’ve got a pirate-themed story slowly brewing in my mind. I suppose I’ll just give a small summary when I finish off these drawings and upload them next time.