Author: Alex

There is a row of Shaxs designs in this book that never made it to screen. A purple, troll-ish thing. A rounder one, closer to a bear or a koala. A scaled, lizardy variant that looks like it strayed in from a different show entirely. The grizzled Bajoran we ended up with is plainly the right call, but the pleasure of an art book like this is getting to stand in the room before that call was made. Tendi gets a quieter version of the same treatment a few pages earlier, a turnaround sketched and resketched with the designers’ own notes scrawled across it, smaller head, smaller eyes, redraw, each pass nudging her toward the character who finally reads as Tendi. That gap between a good idea and the final version is the most interesting thing in the whole book. Having written, lettered, and now and then coloured comics myself over the years, it’s the part I always go looking for.