There’s been a few attempts to get Evan King with the Holloways in one way or another, with both being fairly popular additions to my Spookyverse setting. While it’ll be January by the time this one goes public, for my Subscribers this is going to be the Halloween release, which I think is appropriate. I wasn’t planning necessarily to have a Halloween Dare for October, but I did like this one and so it worked out that way.
Last year we started a new Halloween tradition of a highlight comic set in the Studio Halloween party. Like last year, our randomly-selected costume model, Space Beth, takes the center panel while we check in around the party with the rest. I know some characters who appear here may be hard to place, especially in the glory hole panel, and I imagine some will only be identifiable through the tags in the public post. I’m pretty happy with how this comic turned out, and I hope y’all will enjoy seeing some of the Studio residents enjoying the spooky season.
I thought I had my Halloween content for the year done, but rather late into the game I got the itch to make a new spooky lady. Carina here is a ghoul, and she’s adapting some old design ideas I never got around to using. I’ll eventually flesh her out more with a bio, I’m sure, but for now I hope she makes a good impression with y’all.
So here’s the other half of our ghost duo, Michiyo. Michiyo was envisioned as a Sadako-esque “Ringu”/”The Ring” type ghost. The idea behind pairing her with Yumi was that Yumi (as a snow maiden or yuki-onna type ghost) was tied to snow, while Michiyo was tied to television static, also called snow. I went back and forth on that when writing their bios, since I didn’t want Michiyo’s backstory to just be a copy/paste of Sadako’s. I don’t remember where I started with her connection to the ocean, but there was a point where I considered rebranding her as a ghost who’d rise out of still/reflective waters, including ice, and making that what she and Yuki met through. In the end I added this cursed tape idea to keep her original intent, even if it strengthens her ties to her inspiration. Regardless, I had fun drawing her here, and I hope y’all have enjoyed getting to know these gals a little better.
For the Halloween season this year I’m planning to get out two Spookyverse Bios, and this is the first one. For the Halloween pic in 2017 I introduced Yumi here and her best friend, Michiyo, who will be the other bio at a later date. I’ve seen some pretty fair comparisons of Yumi to Yu Yu Hakusho’s Botan, but she was actually inspired by Aoi from GeGeGe no Kitarō. Yumi was originally an unnamed ghost character who would’ve briefly joined the main party in Eromugen, before being repurposed here as a Spookyverse lady. The Eromugen version would’ve just been a generic ghost, but like Aoi Yumi is a yuki-onna, a type of female snow ghost you may have seen show up in other anime or the like before. I’ll talk a little more about her connection to Michiyo when that bio drops soon.
I had a feeling when I gave the Holloways green hands and feet someone might want to see something like this someday. At any rate, I think Ember’s answer here speaks for itself.
I’ve been really happy to see how well-received Ember and Silas have been, but they’ve mostly just worked with each other with a couple exceptions. I thought it’d be fun to see Ember branch out a little bit, but I wanted to keep with what’s been established with her. So she brought Eren back from a previous pic for another round, along with Ginyu, who we saw (sort of) palling around with Silas at the Halloween party last year.
Dogs and cats fucking together! Mass hysteria!
So I know that this post isn’t going to go public until, like, January probably, but for my Subscribers this is the post that went up on Halloween. Last year a similar thing happened, with Silas doing what he called a “Halloween Dare” that didn’t go public until February. I feel like I’ve been doing a lot with Ember and Silas lately, but maybe that’s just because I don’t usually focus on my OCs too much. Regardless, I hope some folks will enjoy seeing the pumpkin-heads here again for this Dare that takes them a bit outside their comfort zones.
It’s been a little while since I’ve done anything with GeGeGe no Kitarō, and I thought there was a little potential here. Even though he’s not overtly inhuman, I do think Kitarō would feel more comfortable living where the Halloween and similar characters live in the Studio. I don’t remember if I’ve talked about the haunted castle publicly before, but Kitarō and anyone else who’d feel more comfortable there have their own spooky home in the Studio. I wanted to show Kitarō getting along with someone else who lives there, and decided to go with Silas since there’s been some demand.
