The Gangs of Brockton Bay

Illustration of Interlude 20, Accord.  The Ambassadors meet with the other gangs of Post-Leviathan Brockton in order to decide how to fight the Slaughterhouse Nine.  Featured groups:  Ambassadors, the Undersiders, the Teeth, the Fallen.

From web serial "Worm", by Wildbow.

 The Forsberg Gallery.  The building had once been a pristine, albeit distressingly asymmetrical construction of glass and steel.  Now it was a shattered ruin.  There was little rhyme or reason to the design, and navigating was something of a chore.

 The recent altercation with the Slaughterhouse Nine in Boston had been a setback, but he remained confident.  Twenty-three years to see it all through.  Twenty-three years to bring the world into order.  Everything was a step towards those ends.

Even this, as much as the setting and the people grated.

  Accord tightened his grip on his cane.  He itched to end them.  His mind burned with hundreds of ideas on how to do it.  Traps, ploys, ways to set them against one another, or ways to use the other people in the room against them.

INTERLUDE 20



Characters in this illustration:
From clockwise, left to right.

The Teeth  — Animos, Reaver, Spree, Butcher, Hemorrhagia, Vex.
The Fallen — Eligos, Valefor.
The Undersiders — Foil, Parian, Tattletale, Grue, Skitter, Regent, Bitch.
The Ambassadors — Othello, Accord (center), Citrine.


An attempt was made to make this illustration as canon compliant as possible, within the bounds of artistic license.

This was a crazy ambitious illustration that I worked on bit by bit every day for weeks in between other art projects.  It took so long because Interlude 20 is great, but it's great because it's packed with so much detail, so many characters and moving parts, all of which are important to the scene and setting.  So many characters, all with their own personalities and powers, but it's still a single scene, and I only had one single static shot to fit them all into.

The biggest challenge was juggling so many design elements.  The sheer number of minor characters with unique costumes.  The details from the chapter that knew I had to include, like Smug Lisa sitting on a giant plushie, Butcher's Gatling gun, the Forsberg Gallery post-Leviathan, windows broken by Shatterbird, and the view of the Bay.  In the end, I think the final illustration has so much stuff going on that the composition lacks a strong central focus, which is why I originally considered a series of illustrations of the same scene, focusing on each gang and the gang's leader.  

But that's the price paid when you don't want to drop details described by the book because Worm canon is our sacred scripture.