Bloom
Round 3 of Black Market Brawl
Featuring Zyzekanunda by artist-writer Cevapi.
Behind Thyssa
Thyssa as a character is probably one of my favorites, both to write for and to draw. She started off as a simple concept, a big fisherman who sets up shop in the Din, the setting in which Black Market Brawl takes place.
Shuffling through concepts, I eventually landed on a big, bulky butcher who’s lived far longer than she seems. I kept aspects of the original fisherman concept, looking at references of pirates and seafarers for her outfit and accessories.
Historical pirate illustrations, and whale scarification, two key inspirations for Thyssa.
Her figure and body was based off of large marine creatures, especially whales. Her scars are referenced off of the unique ways whales scar, with long, white raised skin criss crossing, each one telling an old story. I also made the decision to place two scars specifically over her eye and throat, not just as an aesthetic choice to show her age and experience, but also to create an explaination for her silence, a point of her character that is explored below.
As for her name, I looked towards myths and legends of sea gods and creatures. Scylla and Thalassa were the two I ended up deciding to take the most inspiration from, both being more primordial beings to convey her age and experience.
This ended up being her final design. She was big, bulky, built like a whale and scarred like one too. Not only was her design an exploration into different body types, but also facial structures and character archetypes.
Her silence also ended up playing a larger role than expected when it comes to her character. Having a silent character meant that I had to both pay more attention to the dialogue writing of my opponent characters to carry the weight of the interactions between both of them, but also forced me to go more of the "show not tell" route, since I literally didn't get the option to tell with Thyssa. Her facial expressions and body language became her voice, the only way for her to communicate to the outside world. Although it does make her stoic and aloof at a first glance, it also serves to create a calm and steady stillness whenever she's shown.
While Thyssa is considered a silent character, she's not entirely mute. I use the rare instances of her talking to exaggerate and emphasis certain beats of a comic, usually limited to just one moment/voiceline per.
ROUND 3: Bloom
This round in particular has a special condition to it, being a boss round. Made it a little more difficult when planning out the script, now that I had an extra character that I had to include in the match. The characters I had to play with were my main opponent Zyzekanunda (Zyz for short), a long-lived stone golem who carries around a healing totem, and our assigned boss character, the Corpseland Hounds and the Mistress, the last remnants of a canivourous line of plants sealed in a jar and the six gargoyles protecting her.
Zyz and Thyssa were both established be long living characters with similar enough motivations; Thyssa just wanted to live the rest of her life in peace, while Zyz was set out to cleanse the Din (where Black Market Brawl 2 takes place) of the evil permeating through the place. Thus, those became the two main ideas for me to express throughout the comic: the guilt of living a long life, watching others suffer and die around you, and the desire to finally make things right.
The comic starts off as all comics do: exposition. The intro portion is a follow-up with my last round opponent character, Sigil. (The whole section is actually just a giant reference to a scrapped idea the artist behind Sigil expressed to me after our round; they were originally going to have the two go on a date of sorts in their comic).
Sigil’s dialogue implies that something has changed in the canals, changed for the better.
The assigned location were the Canals of Refuse, an underground, long forgotten portion of the Din that had been slowly taken over by the toxic, whispering waters of the refuse. While the boss characters were the focus antagonists of this comic, I wanted the setting and location to serve as somewhat of an underlying opposing force. The canals were a prime example of the type of corruption Zyz wanted to fight back against, one he would be willing to sacrifice his life to cleanse.
Then there’s the fish. The fish become a sort of recurring symbol throughout the comic, both dead and alive. When Thyssa enters the canals in the present, the fish are still full of meat, as if an offering to something. The purpose of this gets revealed in the future, but for now all the reader knows is that Thyssa is bringing these fish to the canals and then tossing them, the reason for which is still left up in mystery.
What follows is a match cut to the past, the fish changing to the skeleton of one. Thyssa is shown dumping them into the waters, almost as a sort of waste disposal. Zyz comes up behind her, and his words sets up the themes for the comic: age and the weathering of the soul that comes with time. Zyz mentions that the canals have been stagnant in its desolation for a long, long time, which is a clue to the reader that whatever change that Sigil noticed in the first page of the comic, is a change that happened after Zyz and Thyssa's talk. This is also the first clue-in as to who might've caused the change, as Zyz laments over his inability to stop the water's continuous, draining presence in the canals.
A panel of the fish skeleton is paired alongside the dialogue in this section. As the canal's water physically eats up the remains of the fish, its metaphorically eating away at Zyz as well, the guilt of all these years of losing people to its depths catching up to him.
The second use of the fishbones panel cements what they represent in the larger whole; the two shown in the panel represent Zyz and Thyssa themselves, old remains of a bygone age left to be swallowed up by the waters. The skeleton remains are a crude foreshadowing of what may come if they continue to just sit and watch the canals wither, if they watch the Din as a whole wither away from all its corruption.
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Zyz, however, isn't so willing to sit by and watch it happen.
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The bulk portion of the middle part of the comic simply follows through with Zyz's plan on revitalizing the canals; by finding the Mistress and awakening her to start a new age of life down below. While he succeeds, it ends up being at the cost of his own life, become the Mistress' new host to take root in.
In the end, the point of the full-fleshed fish is finally made clear. The area, now overrun with the growth of carnivorous plants from Zyz, demands something to feed. And now Thyssa, ever the caretaker, comes down to the canals to brain in their feast.
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The new fish are a source of revitalization, nourishment for the canals now. Instead of being eaten up without any substance, being thrown away for the sole reason of being forgotten, the fish of the present are being used to provide and given a reason, a purpose.
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Not only does it end up being a satisfying conclusion for the fish, it also represents Zyz's final redemption; the ultimate sacrifice after years of indecision.
