Marvel.com: When you design a character like Nightcrawler and go so far as to discuss Central African Tribal Scarifications as part of the design, it leads one to ask how much research did you undertake for this series of designs?
Luca Pizzari: The truly great/dangerous thing about Internet researches is that with a simple click they can easily snowball into topic after topic after topic and it’s easy to get lost in too much information; the idea of tribal scarification actually started when designing another character that I wanted to appear in a kind of cameo, Storm, before I was told that we unfortunately couldn’t use her.
Because I usually make a very conscious effort to use a racially diverse cast and to use specific ethnic characters in ways that they don’t simply feel like “token” appearances thrown in there. I started researching the presence and depiction of African culture in ancient Egypt, and from there I started reading about the Nubians, a really fascinating ethnic group living between lower Egypt and modern-day Sudan, and from there I encountered some beautiful images of these tribal scarification that I immediately thought could make for really cool design elements in the costumes. When I realized we couldn’t use Storm—which in my character designs was called “the Nubian”—I still wanted to use those really interesting elements of historic African culture with somebody else in the story, and I immediately thought they’d go well as a nod to Nightcrawler’s classic boot and gloves design. The scarification X logo was a total serendipity bonus.
More on Marvel.com:
oooh, this is a badass design
Imported from Tumblr: http://ift.tt/1MYVgAe
No comments:
Post a Comment