Back in December 2011, I bandied about the idea of doing a crossover between the Animus Funnies gang and the adventurers from my old comic, Fun ‘n’ Fantasy. I thought I’d be able to put something up in 2012. Well, it’s 2013 and as you may have noticed, there’s no crossover to be had on the site.

Believe it or not, I actually did start drawing the crossover. It was only a page, but it was enough for me to decide I wasn’t ready to tackle the project at that time. I moved on to other things, like doing mash-ups and my ill-advised Star Wars parody. But still, the crossover idea stayed in the back of my mind.

As I was thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the art style I used for Fun ‘n’ Fantasy was too different from the style I was using in the Animus Funnies. One set of characters or the other would need to be redesigned for the project to work. I’ve been working so much on getting the look down for the Animus Funnies cast, it would have made little sense to start over from scratch for a crossover. That meant that the Fun ‘n’ Fantasy adventurers would be getting a new look.

This wouldn’t be the first time I redesigned the Fun ‘n’ Fantasy adventurers. The characters got several facelifts back when I was still drawing the strip, the most notable being when I gave them a “manga” look (that being the style I was most influenced by at the time). But when would I get around to actually doing the redesign?

The answer, as it turns out, was yesterday. I drew a first quick sketch that couldn’t have taken more than half and hour. I included Barnaby to give an idea of how the characters would scale with the Animus Funnies cast. Barnaby will tower over the Fun ‘n’ Fantasy adventurers, which makes sense given that he’s a bear.

I have five distinct sizes when I draw Animus Funnies.

Huge        – Barnaby
Tall          – Sass, Tomaw, the Pickle Patch Bandits
Average – Deema, Nektara, Todrick, Red Rich
Short       – Cyran, Big Oonch, Crismus, Popkin
Tiny         – Zoë, Skitter, Mouser

It’s looking like the Fun ‘n’ Fantasy adventurers will be in the Tall category. I’d say Kevin and Mitch (renamed for reasons) will be about Sass’s height, which should put everybody else in context.

Anyway, after the sketch, I started drawing “for real”. I penciled and inked each character one after the other, but all in the same file, so I could keep the proportions right. I started with James, then Frank, then Kevin, then Fab, then Mitch and finally Kim. At first I coloured each as I went along as well, but I stopped after Kevin because I was getting a little tired and wanted to be sure I finished drawing them all before I finished for the night. (Ultimately I ended up colouring them all before I called it quits.) Finally, I used Photoshop to play around with positioning a little.

So now I have the new look, I have most of the plot in my head, I just need to finish the script and start drawing! I’m fixing to start putting pages up before the end of 2013, but I don’t want to rush things either, so they’ll go up when they go up. For now, just know that the crossover isn’t dead!