WOOP WOOP NEW COMIC ALARM

Hey! What're you still doing here? Didn't you know there's a new gag comic up on the main site? Check it out, yo! (Plus, there'll be another comic next Monday, so don't go tossing your fork right away after you're done! Save that sucker.)

But what's that I hear you asking? Who're those strangers in the new comic? Why, my dear rhetorical audience I'm replying to, you didn't think Amnio's mom and dad weren't ever going to show up in the Grey Bouquet world, did you?

Yup, those lovebirds are Warren and Lindsey Horsemann-- aka, former Riders of War and Pestilence in that Apocalypse shindig that wiped out all the humans, thus shooing in the Afterworld as Amnio and friends know it.

True, they've changed a bit since the first concept sketch of 'em, especially Dad and his helmet-slash-bronze-feathers-or-something-I-don't-know mask:



But if you want to see some real design changes, just check out how the Riders looked before they were done with that Big Job of theirs.



Left to right: Death, Pestilence, and War. Pestilence is stretching for a semi-human form here; usually it'd be a formless ichor blob covered with eyespots. Famine's not in this pic, but trust me, it'd look like sort of a saggy inflatable-windsock funnel critter with button eyes on top.

...Okay, so this is a bit of a cheat. The drawing above is from a comic project I tried briefly in college called "Second Horse," told from the POV of an alien from a protozoan-level ocean planet who's brought to Earth for an unknown purpose-- until that purpose turns out to be destroying the humans the blob's grown so fond of, by the time it catches on.

Thing is, I see the Riders from the Grey Bouquet universe as pretty much the same deal: four alien beings roam from planet to planet, taking out whatever they're told is the local pest that needs quieting down on that world, and off they all go to their next assignment. They have such abstract forms simply because 1.) they have no concept of humanity to copy themselves after, and 2.) they're avatars of friggin' elemental destruction. They don't need to look complicated. That'd be showing off, and they have a job to do.

But then there's Earth. And for whatever reason, War and Pestilence were smitten with the place. So much so that when they were done with that particular assignment (read: us), they decided to quit their cosmic temp job and strike it out on their own to emulate what they figured the dream life of the planet's former natives used to be-- that is, settle down in the suburbs and start a family.

Now, it's true, Warren and Lindsey don't have all too clear an image of what humans were actually like, besides the mishmash of videos and advertisements left behind. The forms they've adopted to look "more human" still don't look exactly like the perfect Hollywood couple, and Amnio's some real proof of how secondhand their ideas are for what "the perfect child" is supposed to look like, but... well, for a couple of galactic endbringers, I think they've done well for themselves.


PS: In today's gag strip? Yeah, that's not really how pre-Amnio life worked at all. But he's just a little kid, right? He can learn all the icky details when he's older. Just be glad his folks never heard about those mythic creatures, the "storks."