Dire machines

So this guy is the 2nd and final Machine monster that will show up in the comic. (Technically there were 3 success machines on the Atoll, but that one’s powers never manifest in this current story.) Its probably a waste to concept this guy because his full body only shows up once in the story and the rest of the time his body shot is an emoticon that comes out of this black obelisk looking server rack. Lemarchand was named after the French Toy maker in Clive barker’s Hellraiser series. It was sort of a knod to the fact that hes not necessarily a “Good guy”, and uses his powers sometimes for his own horrible amusement. As your basic “brain-in-a-jar” type character, Hes extremely fragile, light, thin, carries no weapons other then a shield and and cloak. His main weapon is the ability to posses any machine folk (Not including success machines however..). This makes him one of the most powerful success machines in the solar system, as he can just take over your body and use you as a puppet. In the scope of the story he uses the plight of the Atoll machines as a form of distraction to fight the usual Success machine urges toward wanton destruction. Unlike Neodym, he is a neutral character and does not wish to see the ruination of the world and its people.. he needs them for entertainment.

Manny apologies if you thought this guy would have turned out cooler then he did. But there are several reasons why I arrived at this more simplistic design then the one I had originally talked up. Also, Full disclosure, Since the ISS is a very complicated structure that is outside of my general understanding, I elected to give him the same treatment that I did with Neodym. I ripped this same exact dynamic pose based on this image.

I told a couple of people that I wanted to do the ISS “as if the artists for Gundam re-imagined it”. Upon some 5 minute google-fu I come to realize that Gundam, was basically ripping off of the same shit that Syd Mead and Nasa already came up with 20 years prior. Since this Success machine would have been mostly an emulation of outdated tech a space mining corporation purchased for their museum, why reinvent the wheel? Jester mentioned that “If this guy has a God complex why don’t you make him look kind of like a holy cathedral?” So I went with that idea as well as an idea to make him jagged and stained-glassy looking from the call of Duty ghosts intro movie cerebral mentioned. Most of the individual elements have been redesigned simply to look like a roman catholic-church decided it needed a space station. Could I have made the solar panels look like angel wings? Probably.. But  I already did the crazy wing thing for Wulfram and I want to keep all these vehicles monsters looking unique. Lemarchand would have been the most purposeful, intact design of the 3. Not so much like the cancerish brambles or the warped and twisted face-peeling shit from the previous characters.

I still have some left to do … But if you look closely, you can still see some nano root stuff on the body.

(Update) that nanoroot stuff may or may not be slightly augmented for basic survival in space. Space is actually pretty harsh even to machines, so machines that rely upon liquids may have special needs,defenses ect. I guess it makes sense that this guy possesses other space mining drones around him to go mine chunks of space ice from asteroids to bring back. Otherwise he could simply absorb debris floating around once in a while.

This Success machine is rather complicated and is part of the final part of my comic.

The Concepts: 1. Bleeding matador bull + cancer + Cannibalism + millipede + Magnet?

So do to the complex nature of this machine, I decided to base it directly on a photograph by sketching over it and keeping some aspects while removing other aspects. The intent is that the original picture wont be around after I’m done, so its mainly a time-saving measure. In any case, Picture if you will an Iowa class battleship who has mutated into a Success machine. Ive been asking around what might look cool for this concept.. So far playing with the idea of making the turrets gnarled warped and with different sized guns. Playing with the idea of this she-boat using various wreckage as band aids to heal. Thusly “the tails of airplanes” poke out off the deck, maybe other radar towers or pieces from dead ships poke out like spikes. The Guns in the front are overtaken by what looks like a huge cancerous mass of nano machine roots and brambles. haven’t decided if I should just keep the original size of the guns and offset the turrets a little.. or warp and mutate the turrets altogether.

Update: Decided to scrap the idea of millipede legs and “Yamato crab” legs altogether (the logistics of her biting people on land was getting complicated). Instead we will put more emphasis on her magnetic tractor beam power. She can simply pull people into the water towards her bitey open maw.

Half the battle will be defeating her kinetic shield, the other half of the battle will entail infiltrating her body to destroy her heart- the engine. This may or may not require a large bomb in of itself. Once her mouth is open, a High powered magnet comes into effect.. I may not have room to showcase this power tho.   In the meantime ive just been calling her “Neodym the cancer boat”

^Special thanks to cerebral error for editing the text.

^ Super sonic baby. Hard to catch, but when you do- very wiggley. Hard to see in the dark- but you can hear the giggles.

I wanted to continue working on the eldritch scientific study sheets for Atoll Lab and the most logical next step would be to explain exactly what happens to humans once they’ve banged Dire machines enough times. To do so I must do a little illustration of the leg bone of this human guy (whom btw, is talking to his wife over a holocall). The main take away of this page, is that nanomachines have doppelganger variants that copy human blast cells, and suppress the human immune system long enough for the colony to fully integrate into the organism. When the number of machine cells exceed the number of human cells in a limb, that limb turns grey and fades up the body part toward the trunk where it stops. The main explainable factor in all this is just how an alien machine cell can copy the DNA in the cell nucleus down to be able to mimic it as well as it does. If it successfully mimics the Dna in a stem cell, it can kill the original cell and assume its place making machine copy’s of itself and thus changing the physiology of the creature.

Also, this picture is a shout out to Krill who was a donator to the site as well as a nice guy. He may not even visit anymore, but I do know that the Type 45 destroyer was his fav British boat. Krill this one’s for you.

Its so nice to be able to put a beard on a human guy. Beards are my thing. And it seems like all the guys I talk to hate em. Note: If you guys wanna know how I made the background check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izsD9do7SHA

haven’t done much doodling. I will update this this week tho.

Note: Wulfram is my Marry sue character in Atoll lab. As such I am not sure if I will ever use him, because God level characters don’t make for very compelling story material. I may attempt to make his wing hands more realistic and less animu, but at this point his design is 90% dead on. the little symbols on his wing hands is a representation of “full wave rectification” the kind you find on high voltage DC.

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Lando (blocked his profile) has made some new living machine arts! Check it out: