No Blood For Oil

The creative process can be, at times, a very solitary experience. Even when I am working on a project with a team of other people, I find that there is a tendency for everyone to focus on the task at hand to the point that they insulate themselves from the world at large.

That is why it's always good to have many sets of eyes looking over the final product; Quite often, something that seems fine & is perfectly logical within that creative cocoon is percieved in a totally different way from the reader who picks it up with no knowledge other than the work before him...

In a recent podcast review of Mecha Manga Bible Heroes, there was a controversy about the picture shown above. One of the reviewers, seeing the liquid pouring out of the Goliath Robot said he thought it was blood. The other review said he thought is was oil...

The truth is- that liquid should be coolant, like in a car, and should have that day-glo greenish tinge to it... In fact- if you take a close look at the green wires coming from the other spots near David's feet, you can get an idea as to what color SHOULD have been used on that liquid.

How did it happen that it's red & therefore may look to some like blood?

If you look at the overall color scheme of the robot, it's skin is all blacks and dark purples, and the accent colors are all red. The red in the liquid was dropped in to match the other robot colors, forgetting the fact that it should be another color because red liquid in that context looks like blood. It wasn't the colorist's fault, because from a visual standpoint it does flow with everything else on the page, and the direction he was given on that was very unclear.

In this case, what happened was~ because the color didn't stand out as being odd given the color scheme of the rest of the images on the page, nobody noticed until the book was printed.

Does it really matter, however?

Well- our take on Goliath's beheading is FAR less gruesome than the actual Bible text.

Not only did David cut off Goliath's head, he took it and was STILL carrying it around with him some days later when he meets King Saul...

If it does matter to YOU, though, I can honestly say there is no blood in Mecha Manga Bible Heroes.

Robots? Yes.

But no blood.