Marvel: Crisis Protocol – A Look At Blade & Moon Knight’s Art

Marvel: Crisis Protocol – A Look At Blade & Moon Knight’s Art

The Blade & Moon Knight Character Pack arrives in the U.S. on Friday, November 12! To celebrate its release, we wanted to give you a glimpse behind the scenes at what it took to bring these characters to life in Marvel: Crisis Protocol. Today we’re joined by Art Director Josh Colón who discusses the process of creating the beautiful art for these iconic characters! 

As Art Director for Marvel: Crisis Protocol, it is my privilege to guide a roster of incredibly talented artists as they bring some of the most iconic characters of the Marvel Universe to life for our game. On today’s Transmission, I’ll be giving you a quick behind-the-scenes peek at the approach and thought process for creating the artwork for our up-and-coming Blade and Moon Knight Character Pack. Let’s get started!

Embodying the philosophy of using the darkness to battle the darkness, the Blade and Moon Knight Character Pack is themed around the occult and supernatural, revisiting the mystical side of the Marvel Universe first seen in our Doctor Strange and Wong Character Pack. And speaking of the Master of the Mystic Arts, we might feature him and some of his allies in a cameo or two on this pack’s Team Tactics cards!

Blade

First up, we got the Daywalker himself, Blade! On our stat cards, we like to explore multiple pose options to best capture the character’s personality. With Blade, we wanted to emphasize the motion of his iconic katanas and the billowing of his coat.

Superstar artist Tyler Walpole came back with these beautiful gesture sketches and even included a more refined sketch as a proposed favorite. When you work with someone as talented as Tyler, you often end up spoiled with options. After some back and forth, we decided to go with option 4, as we loved the extreme perspective of the pose.

This ability reflects the truly indescribable power of the Juggernaut once he’s at speed. Like a living wrecking ball, he is pushed a Short distance. If he contacts a piece of interactive terrain of Size 3 or smaller, he doesn’t stop, and the terrain is obliterated as he barrels through it. If he contacts another character during this movement, then that character takes 1 damage, and his movement stops. Oh, and if he was Staggered before using the power? He isn’t anymore because (say it with me), nothing stops the Juggernaut.

In fact, movement and momentum are kind of his whole thing. For proof of that, consider his Unstoppable Momentum innate power. After he resolves a movement action, Cain gains 2 Power, and the next attack he makes adds 3 dice to the attack roll. Timed right, you can nail a target with a Strength 10 I’m the Juggernaut! Attack, followed up by a bit of destructive mayhem as he either lays on extra automatic damage or takes out a downtown coffee stand!

We had a pretty clear notion of what we wanted for Blade’s injured side; a dramatic shot of him with fangs bared leaping down towards his enemies. Once again, not only did Tyler knock it out of the park, he added the rips on Blade’s coat to convey a vampiric shape language.

Moon Knight

Sometimes you just know what you want to see out of a character’s art, and that was the case with one of our favorites, Moon Knight! With Marc Spector’s healthy side, our goal beyond making a compelling piece of art was to come up with a way of having a crescent moon shape in the overall composition to honor Moon Knight’s patron deity, Khonshu. This time, little iteration was needed as Tyler hit the proverbial hole-in-one on the sketch.

On the final, we requested a bit more pushing of the dynamic perspective as well as removing the bo staff in order to better solidify the crescent shape of the cape.

His injured side also had few changes from the sketch, as we wanted a more subdued moment of intense determination from our hero. He needed to feel like he was backed into a corner, but certainly still in the fight! The only other directive was to position the eye level to get a better look at his face and costume, as the dynamic perspective of the healthy side (while rad!) obscured a lot of his details.

Dark Banishment

Team Tactic cards offer a fun opportunity to combine powerful game effects with narrative moments from the Marvel Universe. For the Dark Banishment card, we needed to illustrate the impact of multiple Midnight Sons characters coming together to perform a ritual and defeat the powers of darkness. Artist Ursula “Sula” Dorada came out swinging with three fantastic possible compositions, featuring Iron Fist, Doctor Voodoo, and Elsa Bloodstone.

We decided to go with a variation of #3, but asked for Doctor Voodoo to be levitating above the others in order to form a pyramid shape within the composition.

You can see for yourself how Sula’s use of value and color gave mood and atmosphere in the final piece.

Bats the Ghost Hound

As fans of the 2017 comics run of Doctor Strange, we couldn’t resist paying homage to our favorite spectral basset hound, Bats!

The brief for this piece describes a joyful moment between earth’s Sorcerer Supreme and our ethereal goodest boy in Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum study. Even in the comp sketch, artist Gary Daniels III immediately captures the bonds of friendship between magical man and ghost dog.

For the final, we adjusted Bat’s position so he didn’t quite feel like a giant floating undead dog, and added more books and magical paraphernalia to Strange’s study. This one ended up being one of our personal favorites so far.

Siege of Darkness

Some Team Tactics cards can be considered “core” to the identity of an affiliation, both narratively and mechanically, and this proved to be the case with Siege of Darkness. For such an important card for the Midnight Sons affiliation, I knew right away we would have to depict a big battle between the heroes of night and the minions of darkness.

Once again contracting the skills of the talented Gary Daniels III, we worked tirelessly to fit in as many members of the Midnight Sons as we could while keeping the image readable from across the table. We chose four: Doctor Voodoo, Blade, Moon Knight, and Ghost Rider. We elected to put Blade nearest to the viewer and Doctor Voodoo front and center of the action.

By pitting our heroes against nameless ethereal creatures, we gained more freedom to place the characters in the composition and the ability to change the silhouettes of the monsters to match the motion of their dispatching. You can see this most clearly with the two poor specters being defeated by Ghost Rider’s flaming bike!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look inside the making of the art for this character pack! Stay tuned for more on the next Atomic Mass Transmissions!

Thanks Josh! Stay tuned to our website for more Atomic Mass Transmissions and be sure to order your copy of the Blade & Moon Knight Character Pack at your local game store or through our webstore.

See you next time!