CAST

💩 five guys burgers & fries

🍔 Jacob Sean Martin

nick: first thoughts on this dude were the big doofy sailor-moon-melvin glasses & those got drawn on first before i even addressed anything else! i figured since he played the role of the first observer that it would be interesting if you couldnt see his eyes at all, & then not being able to see his eyes bled into him having a near permanent placid smile, like you flat out wouldnt be able to tell what he was thinking at any given moment, really amp up the creep factor. his overall personality then was informed by all of that as things went on. RJ's responsible for adding his fun tooth gap for which im eternally grateful for. the 3 left ear piercings are there sort of as my own artist's signature, as that 3 piercing motif shows up a lot in my solo stuff.

rj: we seemingly nailed jake immediately and his design has seen no change since part 1, other than his jaw growing a little more squared at some point for no particular reason. i always made a point of making him painfully average & of doughy physique amidst his either extremely bony or very fit friends and i like to think that his purposeful blandness makes him stand out in his own special way :)

🐟 Salvatore Lázaro Igon Vela-Herreros

nick: i actually got to his design dead last & was keeping him way in the background in part 1 because id run out of ideas for hot dudes lmfao. then eventually i had to draw him & was so stuck that i decided 'ill just put him in a ski mask so i dont have to think about it' which when combined with his unintentional standoffishness instantly became this eureka moment for me. then i had no truly enormous dudes in this yet so i decided he was a slab of beef which made him even scarier from having sat silent in the background the entire time. i also thought itd be really cute if he had long hair that he couldnt fit under the mask so he had to leave it hanging out the back in a little braid. i ran with the mask motif by keeping his hair in his face when the actual mask was off & therefore had absolutely no clue what his face looked like (my early roughs for him maskless just looked like a thumb with a wig on for a while) until RJ swooped in during the inks & made him the most beautiful bitch on the east coast.

rj: for someone whose face didnt properly show up for a while i immediately knew how i wanted sal to look like under the mask, and in turn the way said mask is drawn has probably changed more than himself. i have no good explanation why i wanted to make him Particularly chiseled out in the face other than to pique people’s curiosity for what the rest of it looked like— also to give what little we had of it more personality.

😛 Malik Halim Umberter Jr. (née Adedeji)

nick: i gave this son of a bitch my entire wardrobe plus my wardrobe wishlist, & that became his whole Thing that he was a health goth babe who was Extremely aware that he was a babe. i didnt really get to show this off until i got to SADS3 when the decision for the murder "uniform" came to him & he could wear whatever he wanted for it. (funny story but the jacket he's got on in SADS3 is an alien body bomber that id had my eye on for years but only recently was able to snag for myself lol) the snakebites & dreadhawk are there for hottie purposes, the winged eyeliner came later in RJ's inks for what i imagine are similar hottie purposes. malik's design was all beauty & extroverted posturing which then i thought would be really interesting to pair with this whole deeply hidden crippling anxiety thing, like he tries to dress & behave extrovertedly so he can "shout" louder & louder to try & drown out his panic.

rj: malik’s design changed the most dramatically from 1 to 2 as we figured out what kind of character he was, going from having stronger (literally) features to something a little more youthful & soft around the edges. this change came with part 3 (which nick was working on as i was finishing up part 1) when he came through in nick’s preliminaries and, i thought, particularly well in a couple of panels that gave him sharp eyes and a very oval & even face. I later adjusted his appearance as best as i could to reflect that idea, but a lot of the “old” design still shows through pretty clearly.

🍴 Stone Callum Pratt

nick: my first design instinct on this guy was "gen-x" cus i decided very much on the spot that i wanted an older hot dude in this too, as the prior 3 designs i had done (jake, garv, & malik in that order) were all really babyfaced unless they were making gross expressions. once i drew him then i started wondering what his deal was that he was hanging out with a bunch of 20somethings & what exactly was his link to the group, which became that he was dating one of them. he does a lot of buttonups over blank t-shirts in his day-to-day, figured itd be fun to just have somebody very casually dressed in contrast with everybody else. his little right ear hoop earring is a little personal nod to childs' right ear hoop earring in john carpenter's the thing, which is such an absurdly minuscule nod that it's basically nothing LOL. him being a transman also was something that i knew from the first panel he showed up in, just like "yup thats a note-to-self factoid for when i draw his pants coming off" & then kept moving

rj: much like jake, stone's features didnt change much if at all, but the changes in style & proportions made him look pretty different. he's probably the character whose face i struggled the most to draw because of how milquetoast he is, perhaps making him look a little like a different person whenever his expressions shifted dramatically (specifically i worried he & garv looked too much alike before skin tones & hair got splotched in, seeing as they both share a thin face & often bugged out eyes). looking back now however his angularity & more aged in look stand out enough on their own.

💅🏾 Garv Jasvinder Chaturvedi

nick: garv's design actually existed before SadS! he first showed up in a 2 page comic i did in 2013 or so about a guy named L.T. having a near miss with a short dude with a bob haircut off craigslist who wound up brandishing a knife at L.T. mid-sexual encounter. garv was the 2nd of the main cast i drew, & when i got to his introduction panel of him standing near the guillotine, i thought back to that old 2013 comic & yoinked the old design out of it for this. otherwise for the upcycling i just tried to make him as cute as possible to contrast with him being the most monstrous by definition out of all of them.

rj: if you compare nick’s prelims to the finals, garv is likely the character who i least messed with looks-wise, from the start he had a cartoonishness about him that i couldn’t emulate, but didnt want to part with, so i relied on nick’s lines to get through to the end-product, which evolved into pushing that aspect of him farther to the forefront, from his hair puffing out to his features hardly being contained by his face, i think it rhymes well with his weird con-creep persona, plus pushing the cute anime boy look is very much an aspect of his personality to begin with lol.