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roukabi · 1 year

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Hee hee! hee hee ho! My grubby furry hands will contaminate everything you love!

(Designs are free to use with credit, if anyone’s interested!)

Exhaustive design notes/trivia/extras are under the cut!

[Image IDs: a series of animal designs for Vide Noir’s characters. Buck Vernon is a sand-colored whitetail deer (how creative) with dented antlers, a brown-and-white striped bandanna, and a guitar slung around his back. Lee Green is a peach-and-cream fox with a white lily above her ear. Frankie Lou is a clouded leopard with a wavy black ‘mane’ of sorts. Jasper and Hontanx are mutts; Jasper is slender and mostly grey with brown dorsal coloring while Hontanx is more boxer-like with short, white fur and grey patches. Johnnie is a german shepherd mix, with half of his face scarred by black-braining, and sports a red bandanna on his leg and a leather World Enders jacket. Moonbeam is a black lop-eared rabbit with lavender undertones, also wearing the World Enders jacket. Alex is a doberman with slicked-back hair, also (also) with a World Enders jacket and much smaller black scar on his cheek. Toby is a very scruffy rufous treepie (don’t ask), mostly tan with a black head and wings with white accents. Finally, Z’Oiseau is a melanistic Bengal tiger, where his stripes are large and take up the majority of his fur. The final image is a lineup of all characters, with heights considered. Each design is still sketchy, and construction lines can be seen. The artist’s signature overlaps each image. End IDs.]

Well, well, well. It appears I’m at the stage of obsession where I make furry designs for the characters. Because I’m always paranoid that I need to explain myself for everything I do, here’s the comprehensive guide to each design. If I’ve done a good enough job, you can tell who’s who pretty easily.

Buck: Hmm, now how did he end up as a deer, I wonder...?

Silliness aside, Buck’s antlers actually play a pretty big role in representing his psyche/self-esteem, as they break off in certain scenes until the end, where they become shattered stumps. Jasper breaks + steals one antler when Buck gets black-brained, which I’m sure can be used as a metaphor for something.

He’s also got big ol’ floppy ears. When I make animal designs, I try to mimic the form of someone’s hair via the ears or cheek fur, though, as you’ll soon see with Frankie, that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. You’ll also notice that he wears a bandanna, even though he doesn’t in the film. This is because I felt his design lacked color. And bandannas are cool. And my brain is addled with Hadestown parallels.

“But Rook!” I hear you say, “If Buck’s a deer, how can he play guitar? And how is he supposed to hold a gun?” Well, the answer to the first question is that he plays with his teeth. Obviously. And the obvious conclusion to the second question is that he doesn’t need artillery when he has a crown of stabby stabby bone.

Lee: Lee is a fox - outwardly desireable and a character of multiple folktales. There’s not much to say about her design otherwise, except for the addition of a lily - referencing ‘Fool For Love’ with “I’m asking Lily to be my bride” as well as ‘La Belle Fleur Sauvage’. Oh yeah, and she’s way too big compared to the other characters in the height chart lmao pretend she’s the average fox size

Lee fascinates me, and I think I’m the only one who thinks that way lol. It’s revealed at the end that she had Way more agency over her situation than everyone realized. Did she know about Z’Oiseau’s kill count before getting with him? Does she know now? AFWP says that she overcame the Vide Noir addiction, how did that go? Did severing herself from the drug sever connections to Z’Oiseau’s empire? What does she actually think of him? What are her songs like? Is she okay? Does she regret anything? Is she the same Lee who’s known as Lee Avery in the World Ender MV? AAAAAAAAAAAA

Frankie Lou: Picking the animal was easy, designing her was not. Clouded leopards are native to Cambodia, and I wanted Frankie and Z’Oiseau’s designs to complement each other in some way (I’d made Z’Oiseau’s design before I made Frankie’s). So there’s a spotty kitty and a stripey kitty. Clouded leopards are also insanely elusive, which adds to Frankie’s mysterious ghost facade in the film.

I normally don’t like adding ‘human’ hair to animals, but when I initially made Frankie without her hair, it really felt like something was missing. I like the way it looks now, and her plumed tail ties it together. The spots are not end-all-be-all, and can be simplified for animation.

Jasper and Hontanx: What better to chase after our Arthurian White Stag (Buck) and Teumessian Fox (Lee) than a pair of hunting dogs? Jasper and Hontanx needed to complement each other in the classic “Big Guy, Little Guy” trope, with the ‘little guy’ (Jasper) being tall, slender, and shrewd, while the “big guy” (Hontanx) is muscular and rarely speaks. Their names even follow the Kiki-Bouba effect.

I thought about making Hontanx fluffier, but the boxer look fits well, too. There’s some patches of longer fur around his neck and shoulders.

Johnnie: Everyone’s favorite little hurricane! Johnnie gives me exciteable puppydog vibes, so I made him a German Shepherd mix (mix, being “something fluffy”). His cheek fur is missing on his black-brained side, and his eye is a little messed up, but here’s what he looks like when he’s a-okay:

Moonbeam: Rabbits are associated with the moon in multiple mythologies, so it’d make sense to make Moonbeam one. I haven’t drawn her in her fortune teller gear, but I think she’s happier to don the World Enders jacket instead. She’s also got some purple undertones for flavor, and they make her stand out as the only design with a cool color pallete. She’s just got that transfemme swag, I suppose.

Alex: For a character who only appears for 2 seconds, Alex seems to have made a permanent impression on Vide Noir fans, including myself. Strong, tall, and effortlessly cool, I wanted him to look like a model World Ender. This mayyyy have resulted in him looking nothing like his younger brother, but maybe one takes more after their father, and the other, their mother. Idk. I have this whole backstory thing with Cobb where the Redmaynes have this godawful father that Cobb helps them... get rid of. Because Cobb is the better dad.

Alex is the last of this bunch to be a canine, which I’m sure you’re all glad to hear. I don’t know why there are so many dogs. They just have that rugged look to them that suits the World Ender/Bounty Hunter style. Well, these ones do, anyway. Not Lee.

Toby: Toby was by far the most aggravating to design, and it’s pretty apparent in the final result. I mean, have you heard of a rufous treepie?

I had no idea what I wanted Toby to be, but I wasn’t about to draw another canine. As Z’Oiseau’s nephew, he’d be associated with birds by default, so I started thinking about the kind of bird Toby could fit - it’d have to be territorial, annoying, and/or aggressive.

Like... blue jays?

While blue is not a color I’d associate with Toby, for whatever reason, I was getting somewhere. Blue jays are a part of the family Corvidae. Corvidae has birds that are black. Blackbird = Z’Oiseau! See? There’s a connection!

I scrolled down through Wikipedia’s corvid list until I came across the Rufous Treepie, a bird not only described as ‘opportunistic’, but ironically has a symbiotic relationship with local deer populations... It’s also large enough to get stabbed by an antler from a certain less-willing-to-cooperate deer.

So that’s what I went with. Toby’s meant to look more like a fledgling, given the scruffiness. I took some creative liberties with facial markings, but like. Who cares.

“But Rook,” you say, “If Toby’s a bird, and Z’Oiseau isn’t, how are they related?” Well, the obvious conclusion to come to here is that you should stop asking questions.

Z’Oiseau: It’s Zazo time! With a name like 'bird’, you’d expect him to be a bird. But I figured that making him a big cat would play very well into the irony of his name and would present him as a real threat. After all, you didn’t find Tobey very scary, did you? And who names a bird “bird”?

Because Z’Oiseau’s original name, Zozo, is Euskara, a language spoken in the Pyrenees, that was my first place to look for animals. Nothing jumped out to me, though, so I moved on to looking up big cat species and hoping for the best. Then an idea came to me - what about a tiger, but with reversed stripes? It’d fit the reasoning behind the “blackbird” name, and he’d be the most powerful big cat out there. To my surprise, melanistic tigers do exist, and they’re really cool. I picked the Bengal tiger of India for Z’Oiseau, as most of the ‘black tigers’ have been spotted there.

Z’Oiseau’s stripes can be simplified for animation or what-have-you. Or you can draw every individual stripe as presented in the photo, I’m not gonna stop you.

Well, that’s that! Might make Tubbs Tarbell and Cobb Avery later. For now, as a reward for making it this far, here’s some silly scribbles + shitposting:

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youre-only-gay-once · 1 year

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Frankie Lou ⋄ The Silence of the Moon ･｡ﾟ✧: *.☽ .*𝄞｡ﾟ･

#frankie lou #vide noir #lord huron #myvngifs #tw flashing

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a-matter-of-yeet · 2 years

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When Strange Trails is the only LH album some ppl talk about bc it’s got The Night We Met and all I want is more ppl to talk to about the Vide Noir movie and the whole Lonesome Dreams/GRJ plotline and how George’s bar might be run by GRJ himself and probably none of the characters in the Lonesome Dreams stories are in the Strange Trails/Vide Noir timeline and are actually characters in all of GRJ’s books that some of the characters in ST/VN have probably read and how Lonesome Dreams might be from Buck Vernon’s pov during his trip to the east where he’s reading all of the GRJ novels and then the Strange Trails timeline begins right after he gets back and then he and Johnnie Redmayne had a bit of a ✨thing✨ during Dead Man’s Hand despite Buck being simultaneously trying to romance Lily before having some kind of weird hallucination situation with The Night We Met because that song is very clearly about him hallucinating someone (Lily? Leigh? Louisa? Whoever she is bc she’s mysterious) and then realizing that hallucination which actuallly connects to Never Ever in Vide Noir which is his possibly second hallucination of someone but anyway after Buck’s moment in the beginning of Strange Trails the plot shifts to the other Strange Trails characters until Vide Noir happens where Buck is now onto another girl, Leigh Green, who gets into weird drugs (Vide Noir, guys go watch Products of The Universe on YouTube) and runs away from Buck who gets a bit weird and goes on a crazy love quest and I don’t want to spoil anymore for ppl who want to discover the lore for themselves but THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE LOVE FOR THIS INSANE FICTIONAL UNIVERSE IN ALL THE LORD HURON MUSIC BC GOD DAMN IS IT AWESOME

#lord huron #Johnnie Redmayne #Buck Vernon #cobb avery #Dale Redmayne #Frankie Lou #Leigh green #George ranger Johnson #strange trails #vide noir #long lost #lonesome dreams #COME ON GUYS #THERE’S A WHOLE WORLD INSIDE THE MUSIC #vide noir movie

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grjarchive · 2 years

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Love Like Ghosts (1987)

A new era begins!

It's obvious that George Ranger Johnson had plans for something in the vein of his Strange Trails series early in his career. The end of Lonesome Dreams was an opportunity to explore broader and more esoteric ideas than could fit into even the strangest westerns, and the frequency with which these new stories began to be published was clear evidence of a great backlog of ideas let loose.

The series would spiral around a framing device, a bar called "George's Place," an obvious fictionalization of the Broken Bottle tavern that Johnson managed, an out-of-the-way place in the desert outside the town of ██████████. Johnson's characters would often be inspired by the customers and performers at the Broken Bottle, but on the other side of the page, at George's Place, they came bearing tales worthy of pulp novels - westerns, or something like contemporary westerns, in some cases, but also ghost stories, paranormal horror, romantic tragedies, even brief forays into trendy science fiction.

The very first Strange Trails story would also be the first in the loose Frankie Lou trilogy. A recurring character in Johnson's œuvre, Frankie Lou was a fictionalization of his friend Francine Lu, a Cambodian-American lounge singer who performed on occasion at the Bottle. Of course, this meant that Frankie was a regular at George's.

One of the few known photos of Francine Lu, who would inspire GRJ's Frankie Lou trilogy. Unfortunately, like so many visions of old friends this photo is warped by time's blur.

In Love Like Ghosts, Frankie arrives to the bar and narrates a tale to washed-up country star Buck Vernon, the closest thing that Stranger Trails has to an overarching protagonist. Frankie spins a heart-wrenching tragic romance that evolves into a chilling ghost story.

To say more would be to spoil the story, which as always I encourage you to track down yourself, in the dusty back rooms of used bookstores in the bad part of town, or in "to donate" boxes in eccentric late relatives' attics. To those who may be wondering, I get my own copies from ███████ ██████████. But suffice to say, Frankie, and by dint Johnson, weaves in everything from La Rochefoucauld references to hints of Cambodian history. And then there's that crucial bit in chapter 14...

I heard then a song pass over the graves, echoing from somewhere deep in the gnarled woods beyond. As this song on the breeze passed over each and every stone, each and every one now as monumental as the pillars of Gibraltar, beyond which Ulysses sailed into the underworld, they carried the names of the dead. Lovers and friends long lost, the wind carried their names to me. One grave said only "Huron." The wind came and it carried this name to me too, gentle, "Huron, Huron..."

Strange trails will unwind as we continue, and they will take us who knows where.

Keep following this blog for more insight into Johnson’s work through the years.

May you live until you die!

#george ranger johnson #grj #strange trails #love like ghosts #frankie lou #francine lu #buck vernon #pulp art #pulp cover #vintage pulp #pulp #vintage paperbacks #paperback #ghost #romance #lord huron

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