Most folks don’t seem to know this, but the 1987 film, The Princess Bride, is based on a book of the same name by William Goldman from 1973. The book is built around a clever and hilarious conceit that for obvious reasons couldn’t be incorporated into the film: it’s supposedly a modern abridgment of a classic Renaissance story written by “S. Morgenstern.”  Princess Bride is in truth entirely Goldman’s work and S. Morgenstern is entirely made up. It’s worth reading the wikipedia entry on the book which details all the clever additions to this whole literary spoof, including a subsequent book Goldman published under the S. Morgenstern name, a supposed lost chapter you could get mailed to you by the publisher, and Buttercup’s Baby, a sequel mentioned in some editions of the book. Anhoo…

I is for Inigo Montoya – From The Princess Bride by William Goldman 

As I’ve done with any previous AlphaBooks subject who’s from a book which was later adapted to film, I’ve gone back and used the original text as my start-point. In the case of Inigo Montoya, there’s surprisingly little description of him in the text. This is just about all we get:

The second, also dark, probably Spanish, was as erect and slender as the blade of steel that was attached to his side.

Beyond that quick description, I dug up a bit of visual research on Reniassance-era Spanish clothing that helped me get a general look for him which wound up being a lot different than Mandy Patinkin’s version of the character from the film.

Process: I did a pencil/colored pencil drawing of the character in my sketchbook, then inked in Manga Studio, colored in Photoshop.

I was on the fence for “H”, waffling between this guy and Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s Lolita. Ultimately, I went with Hiro mainly because I got a better initial doodle of him on Saturday night, but also because there really is no description of Humbert in Lolita–or, rather, there is no reliable description of him. Humbert describes himself as being rakishly handsome, but like the rest of his narration in the novel, that’s a bit dubious.  Instead, I went with this guy: cyberpunk hacker, expert sword-fighter, pizza delivery guy… Hiro Protagonist.

H is for Hiro Protagonist – From Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson

One interesting thing I stumbled upon when working on this is a website that uses police composite software to generate images of literary characters based on their written descriptions. There’s a write-up on it here. It’s a cool idea, but I thought the image if Hiro it generated just looked like an Asian guy with dreadlocks, rather than a mainly African-looking man with Asian-ish eyes, as per the description in Snow Crash:

Hiro has cappuccino skin and spiky, truncated dreadlocks. His hair does not cover as much of his head as it used to, but he is a young man, by no means bald or balding, and the slight retreat of his hairline only makes more of his high cheekbones…. Beneath this image, it is possible to see Hiro’s eyes, which look Asian. They are from his mother, who is Korean by way of Nippon. The rest of him looks more like his father, who was African by way of Texas by way of the Army.

Here’s the pic the software came up with:

Next week: “I”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.

This may be the drawing that causes me to break my heretofore unbroken AlphaBooks rule of only doing one character from a particular book. I really want to do Tom Bombadil also… but we’ll see.

G is for Gimli – From The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

There are a lot of things not to like about the film version of The Lord of the Rings, but pretty high on my list is the way the character Gimli is dealt with. One of my favorite parts of the novels is the way the relationship between the dwarf, Gimli, and the elf, Legolas, grows and develops over the course of the books from animosity into great friendship. In the films we get “dwarf tossing” jokes and Legolas doing a “rail ride” on his shield. Ugh.

For this drawing I tried as much as possible to expunge the look of the film Gimli from my head and come up with something closer to what I might have imagined for the character the first time I read the books. Keeping with the Germanic/Nordic origin of mythological dwarfs (or, more properly when discussing Tolkien, “dwarves”) I took a lot of ideas about the costuming from this website about Viking Age clothing.

Process-wise, I went with what’s now becoming my standard AlphaBooks procedure: pencil sketch on paper, tight pencils over that in SketchBookPro, digital inks in Manga Studio, and color in Photoshop. Here’re the first two drawings from that sequence:

Next week: “H”…

You can find all the AlphaBooks entries to-date at the AlphaBooks tumblr: http://alphabooks.tumblr.com. You can also follow many of the entries as they’re posted in real-time by following the #AlphaBooks hashtag on Twitter on Mondays.