Gooday everyone,
Welcome to the Deacon Corner. If you’re new here, this space dives into the inspirations behind the images you’ll find throughout the books on these pages. What began as a place to share commission breakdowns has grown into something more. In addition to detailing how each piece came to life, you’ll now find expanded chapter notes, lore entries, and my own black-and-white concept illustrations which are raw glimpses into the ideas that shaped this world before they fully took form.
Before we begin, it’s important to say that none of the beautiful stylized images found in the hard and soft copies of these books would exist without the incredible talent of Sickjoe who is quite literally the heart and soul of this visual world. If you appreciate his work as much as I do, I highly encourage you to visit his gallery and explore more of his creations.
Now, without further ado, let’s take a look at the featured image and learn a bit more about the lore hidden in this chapter.
Gama: She is an unusual mixture of human, amphibian, and insectoid. For lack of a better descriptor, she is who Two-face would be if he were a teenage girl. Her left side is a confusing mixture, the wing of a dragonfly erupting from her back scales protruding from her leg, and chitin mixed with the skin along her arm. Scales appear along her right cheek like enlarged freckles, and she has a gnarled horn growing from the right side of her forehead, pressed against her scalp, like an overgrown canine. Her fingers on her left hand are more like claws and her knuckles flushed red, a lobster’s exoskeleton.
Her right side is the complete opposite of her left. Gama’s hair is pure white, and she has a dusting of freckles across her nose. Additionally, there is a diode in her left eye (Three spinning yellow circles). All things considered, she is a beautiful girl, save for her left side.
Gama is far more bashful than Morta but, being her daughter is often forced into revealing outfits and short skirts. Given how insecure she is about her left side, she’s not comfortable with this and often wears shorts beneath her outfits to cover up. She wears an engagement ring on her right hand shaped like a viper, fangs poised, ready to strike.
Background: Throughout most of this novel, Gama is trapped within the belly of her biomechanical retainer named Sippero. Similar to Igor and Charon, Sippero was designed specifically to serve and protect her. However, he is enormous, a giant whale that lives deep beneath an unknowable ocean.
Gama disobeyed Morta and was punished, Sippero swallowing Gama whole in a perverted sense of love for her. She now lives out her days wandering in the belly of this biomechanical beast. Think of a strange mixture of wiring, mechanics, and flesh. Chemiluminescent lights (Think deep-sea angler fish) dangle from the ceilings and she has to tiptoe between the gastric folds of his stomach, dodging grey pools of acid. A boring existence, all things considered.