Wow. That looks fucking awesome.

The character at the top left corner is crucial to the whole story, so I can't reveal his/her identity now. Whoever that figure is, the location is the Lospass island, top floor of the Flower, Sun and Rain Hotel. Near the top floor, there's also a bank, in which there is a safe with a double security lock mechanism. Ed McAllister is the one responsible for the safe. That "Vermillion 01" isn't Linda Vermillion, but she is related. Notice the barcode on her neck. The code means "Kamui". A technical aside, Garcian is holding his gun with his left hand, while holding the briefcase with his right. That was actually a mistake, Garcian uses his right hand to shoot, but he can use both hands ala Deunan. That Harman Smith, I was starting to draw his young version, but ended up adding too many facial features, so he ended up looking older. But anyway, in this story, he's not dressed like a priest and he's not on a wheelchair either. Samantha is still around, though. "Vermillion 01" is young Harman Smith's assassin. She was "lent" to him as a failsafe device in order to terminate either Harman or Emir Parkreiner in case things get out of control. Matsuken is similar to his game counterpart, and those papers represent votes in his favor. The number written by hand is incomplete, it's "10.000.000". Matsuken's father, Shinji Matsuoka is an influential ex-politician, that was assassinated at Mt. Koya by two members of the Japanese House of Representatives. Those two were able to contact Harman to settle the deal. Harman sent in Coyote and Kaede. Garcian went in to clean the aftermath.

Yet another.... montage of quick sketches - this one's a promo. I'm promoting myself the comic to help sales, like suda51 with NMH, lol: The literature on Travis' shirt was inspired on this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKcevMFUCo

Without really realizing it, I've accumulated quite a number of sheets with killer7 scribbles and shit on them. I'm just posting here some of the sketching I've been doing the past few days: This is kind of like a gag. The original idea was to have samantha just beating the hell out of Harman, but ended up being her just chilling out while the old man is having trouble in the south. This is just a cool pose for Harman. The gun is whatever. I just needed him to be shooting a big gun, that's all. This is pretty much my idea for Ayame Blackburn. Instead of an UZI, I thought it would be cool for her to be carrying arround a big ass chainsaw on her back, like a school backpack.

DAMN! That's some seriously cool stuff you've drawn, Kitano. Props! I particularly like the way you've captured Samantha. And Young Harman, too. They're fuckin' ACE! D'you paint at all?

I really love the K7 art you've posted, Kitano, this is seriously great stuff!

Thanks for the props y'all. D'you paint at all? Yeah, I do enjoy painting, either digitally or by hand. It's just that I'm losing my patience to do it these days. Plus, I generally prefer the monochrome drawings. I think color sometimes defuses the original drawing strength. Anyhow, what you see above is just a collection of unfinished looking sketches. I don't consider them finished "art pieces" or anything. It's just pulp stuff that belongs to everyone. Actually I consider my art as whole one big pile of disposable garbage. But I like it that way, don't know why. I don't consider myself an "artist" either. I'm not too fond of the words "neat" and "clean". Even if I started out that way, my traces used to be all clean and traditionally manga like, but since then I've started taking inspiration from practically everything I come across. And now everything has this messy look about it. It was all directly drawn to the paper without any pencilling first. I like it like that. Even the pen I used was one of these regular shitty ball pens I have at work to write reports, lol (all of those were done at the wokplace). But yeah, in the comic itself, I plan on doing a few pages in color, like in certain manga. Speaking of which, my own style here is quite inspired by various manga, especially Hiroaki Samura and Kentaro Miura.

I'm very fond of that style. Keep up the good work!

Your sketches get more and more awesome with each new one you post!

I just have to echo whats being said. You're awesome.

I've manifested my willingness to do a visual novel type game a while back out of HIK7 even if the base story is the same, and I don't know what's the experience any of you guys have of such things. I've actually pulled off some sort of demo with RM2k3 a couple years ago using stills from Policenauts just to -*test*-('") the thing, but do you guys know of any -more suitable engine- to build a visual novel that doesn't require huge ammounts of coding? I've heard of both Ren'py and Blade Engine, but both of those require some serious time to get familiar with the language. Well, at least the most decent of the two, Ren'py. RM2k3 (a boosted up version I've found somewhere that accepts mp3's and more than 256 color bitmaps for pictures) works for me because of it's simplicity even for idiots such as myself, but it isn't really made for this kind of thing. It's more suited to old school J-RPG's than visual novels. I'm thinking of a visual interactive comic because I think it would actually be a better experience than a straight up comic. Plus, the added bgm's, sfx... and the surprise factor is maintained (since in a comic you can just scan the page and you already know what's going up ahead even if you haven't read it yet). I can also integrate interactive elements such as persona changes at certain points (which can be a pain in the ass, because it boosts up the branching aspect of the story - a good opportunity to take advantage of the "sleeping persona" feature of the actual game to limit the branching thing). With RM2k3, I'll probably end up doing something very similar to Policenauts in the interface department. But what I really dig is the Silver Case interface. I don't know what's your opinion on this. Should I invest on an interactive comic format? If so, do you people know of any easy to use toolkit for this kind of thing? I've found this ADRIFT engine made by someone in the UK, and I'll try it out, it looks simple enough.

Color sketch. This is just to -*test*-('") a few things. This version of Kaede is the one I'm going with, it's based on the beta trailers model: The gun I unsuccessfully tried to draw was the .45 AMT Hardballer. Changed the color from chrome to black to disguise how imperfect it is, and added a cheesy lens flare. The Kanji reads "Kaede", which means "Maple". I think that's what her name means in the game. EDIT - A bit higher quality. No text except "Kaede". The reds are a bitch to compress.

I came. Hard.

A rough layout of one of the possible pages... This is the original Kaede drawing:

That is kickass.