The Making of Destiny's Hand:
Sketch Pad #6 - Badru
Written by DeFilippis & Weir • Art by Buckethead
Badru is a native from one of the local islands. He is viewed by many in the crew as a primitive, maybe even a bit savage. But he's one of the few crewmembers who can read, and despite his massive frame and skill in fighting, he doesn't tend towards violence. He admires Blaine's gentlemanly way with piracy.
Badru was completely redesigned before the sketch you see here. The first design for Badru wasn't in a design sketch. It was in a 3 page sequence done by Buckethead at the very early stages of character and story breakdowns. Buckethead was, we think, trying to make certain he had the job (in our minds he already had it by then, so maybe he was just flexing his sequential muscles) and he put together three pages of Olivia (then named Andrea) and Badru coming ashore to look for medicine for Blaine. It was unscripted, just stuff Buckethead came up with. It was very cute stuff, and a good test drive on Olivia's look.
But Badru at the time didn't look very different, ethnically, from the rest of the crew. So when we sat down with Jason to talk designs (see our notes on Diego for more on that), one of the things we discussed was Badru. We wanted him to be an islander, with traces of Native American to his design. While Destiny's Hand is set in a fictional world with fictional ports, the feel is very Caribbean. So if you look at the setting as vaguely Caribbean, then think of Badru as a native of one of the islands like Hispaniola.
Given the cues to redraw him, Buckethead, as usual, hit the design out of the park. As you can see.
