Badass is the longest living project I've worked on. Its name is taken from a ship in Gravitys Rainbow and refers to a ship in the eponymous universe. As of now Badass consists of countless sketches, a two page comic, an aborted novel, a nearly finished novel, and a trailer for that novel. But there's so much more still locked in my head. Over time the concept, and the world, have evolved. At one point Badass would have been a Grand Theft Auto clone in a Stainless Steel Rat like universe. It went trough a hard gothic scifi phase. Finally it's grown closer to the SSR again in the novel.
Here's the original pitch:
"Picture the fucked up wasted psycho assholes from hell that will throw a 10 ton bomb on your grey salaribox just cause they think its a neat way to start a monday.
Hell, these guys are so badass they don't even get out of bed on monday. Or tuesday.
Anyway, expect loads of guns. And bombs. And a astonishing amount of insurance claims."
Screenshots:
concept art for a very old version of Badass, which was more, well, badass. This is not a robot, you see, it's a cyborg run by a brain impounded from a corpsicle, legally dead and thus property of 'the state'. The other characters were to have been a cyborg witout a brain and thus legally a non-person, and a young girl, living legal citizen, who wants to be a living dead but is not accepted by the vampire community... go figure.
A virtual city called Transit, this started as a 3D design that ended up being pivotal.
one can never have too many spaceship designs. These were doodled for fun, then fleshed out in flash; I intend to make Blender versions to populate Haute Bruxelles (Since renamed Bootstrap)
inspired by a collection of night boxes at a bank in Hasselt, this is a design for the BADASS interiors. I've since decided on another style, inspired by Russian space engineering, but this texture got another life in 'The Deep'
this is the uncolored version of the comic, which did not gain much from being inked. I tried to ink it in ballpen, on a train. On the plus side it conveys some of the humor that BADASS has since lost. The original concept called for a Body Count Counter in the top left of each page.
the new crew is totally different; we still have the huge warrior, and the cute girl (although she is now a thoousand year old witch). But I've added a Very Sexy Girl and a gentleman-spy. I wrote two books about Badass between the last picture and this one. The world is so fleshed out now it's virtually impossible to change. And yet you won't see Very Sexy Girl in the first movie.
Mecha are incredibly cool, but it's rather impossible to devise a grounded reason for their existence. At this point the use of Mecha in BADASS is limited to ARES for unspecified reasons.
this, incidentally, is a character design that was written into the first novel, 'Library', but after that cut. It's a cyborg hosting multiple personalities; post-human fps addicts.
There's BADASS which has come to center around the solar system, and more specifically the earth-moon. There's the industrial high tech power base of Armaghast. Then there's the 'Humanité Fracturé' which includes all the other colonies. But there's a lot of storyverses linked vaguely or directly to BADASS. This is something from the Matergeist storyverse, that ended up largely redacted out of BADASS...
