For his new comic book series, Mandril, P.I., author Christopher Brimmage needed a map to showcase the city where the adventures of his protagonist take place. Here's a short description of the place by the author himself:
And here's the link to the Kickstarter!Toonsville is a 1950s-style noir metropolis teeming with cartoon creatures of every imaginable species whose lives and traditions are governed by cartoon tropes.
The center of the city is a dilapidated, black-and-white neighborhood named The Grays that was created before color entered the world. Neighborhoods grew outward from there as new cartoons were created and new characters/species were invented. With few exceptions (Manny being one), species of toons tend to live in the neighborhoods created for them (e.g. The Rabbit Hole for rabbits, The Turtle Shell for turtles, Man-Hattan for humans).
Client was happy with me sharing my progress with you guys so here goes. They provided me with a wonderful sketch and a pretty extensive legend, so I could get started with the clean version right away. The plan is to work my way through the legend, adding the neighbourhoods one by one.
- First on the list was the Grays! The area reflecting the early days of comic books. As you can imagine, I added it in 100% grey;
- Next I added the Rabbit Hole, a patch of grassy hills tall as high-rise buildings, riddled with rabbit holes (as the name suggests);
- West of that is the Duckpad, with a rather suburban section situated around a large (duck) pond and a larger, much more populated section filled with tenements;
- And in the north is a neighbourhood called the Mouse House. This starts as a rather pleasant part of town, complete with a conference hall shaped like a giant cheese, but quickly devolves into a series of slums and shanty towns surrounded by tall, very shoddy tenements inhabited by – you guessed it – mice.
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And that's as far as I got! Next up will be Little Mexico, a large area west of Duckpad that is home to Cowboy and Native Indian cartoons... and a whole series of movie studios!