Dragons Bleed Black

On the day the last dragon died, not a star hung in the sky.

500 years ago, at the end of the Crusades, the land was cleansed and wiped clean of dragons.

Centuries later, whether by chance or by providence, a full-blooded dragon was born. The last of her kind.

In the city of Elyris, a lonely girl named Penance meets a wayward street rat named Noah. Over the course of one long night, they find meaning in each other’s isolation and awaken a serpent at the end of the world.

Inspiration for the story

Going into this project, the very first thing I knew was that it was going to feature dragons. But I’ve always had a strong feeling of “if humans and dragons exist at the same time, they’re definitely going to try and kill each other!” from the kinds of fantasy stories I liked growing up, so that was the direction my mind went instantly. For instance, the Dragoons in various Final Fantasy games or the Tiamat race in Knights in the Nightmare. In terms of the specific feeling of “dragons existing alongside humans in human form” and the specific relationship between humans and dragons in this world, I took a lot of inspiration from the way in which Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid portrayed the relationship between two species.

It kind of bummed me out when I decided that the dragons were going to all be dead, but I felt it would make the story and characters a lot more interesting if that were the case. What does the world look like after the humans have won? What did the humans want to achieve by killing the dragons? How did the dragons feel about humans? These were the kinds of questions I was asking myself while drawing the story.

I felt it would be more interesting if the story asked the characters to question how they, as people in the world, react to the circumstances of their world. I wanted to include a lot of perspectives, such as the characters’ personal beliefs as well as the religious views of their society. I wanted the reader to leave the story with more thoughts and questions than when they came into it. The characters in the story have their own views and ideas, and I hope that the reader is able to empathize with and understand these feelings while reading.

But why dragons?

Dragons are awesome.

Characters

The initial idea that became the character of Penance came about when I was fighting Messmer the Impaler in Elden Ring. I was inspired by the image of the “abyssal serpent” and a writhing mass of pallid, winged, malformed snakes being one step away from dragonhood. I was taken by the tragedy of a character who had been handed this great legacy and power and grand purpose by the circumstances of his birth, but for whom these things all ended up becoming a curse. From there, the idea began to flourish.

She was always a wanderer, from the moment the idea was born. I kept coming back to the image of Zero at the very start of Mega Man Zero 2, hobbling through the desert, and the idea that “dragons can wrap their wings around themselves” came to me instantly. I hope that a lot of that inspiration was able to come through in the way I drew her.

At one point in development, I really wanted her to be a tall, “sexy” type character with a lot of self-confidence and bright hair, but as I drew her and considered the character, she ended up being the exact opposite! I’m really attracted to manga characters with pitch-black hair, and so I became excited about the idea of this black-haired, sullen girl. In particular, I think that the works of Sui Ishida and Tatsuki Fujimoto stood out to me in terms of having characters with striking black hair, along with Bokura no Hentai’s Parou.

Another thing that I became sure of the more I drew the character was that I wanted for her to have a perpetual nosebleed. I had once read a manga featuring a blood demon with blood dripping from her nose, and that image was very strong in my mind when I was solidifying the character of Penance. At first, it fit an “unhinged, manic girl”-type character, but as the character shifted away from that, I felt it continued to signal a manner of “leakage” of personality that I was very attracted to.

Something that was very important to me when coming up with her design was that I wanted to make sure to incorporate a strong feeling of “loss” or “lost potential”. That’s why I wanted her to be a dragon with ground-down horns and tattered wings. Originally, I was at a loss as to how I wanted to draw her tail in every panel, but I realized that it would be more striking if she was without a tail, and so when she forms a cobbled-together tail made out of scales and blood, the image would be stronger. I hope that this manner of “pieced-together undead” was also conveyed through her bandaged-up scale arm.

The character of Noah was created because I needed a male lead for the story. When I decided that Penance wasn’t going to be a super confident, outgoing kind of character, I realized this story wasn’t interesting enough with her as the sole protagonist, and that she needed to meet someone to bounce off of right from the start. I’ve long been enamored with the idea of a princess cast off from her throne, like in Yggdra Union, but I realized quickly that the secondary character had to be male. So, the image of the roguish thief Milanor right next to princess Yggdra was where my mind immediately went!

In terms of character and attitude, I wanted to go completely “JRPG protagonist” with him. I mixed Milanor and Yggdra together, threw in Locke and Zidane and Vaan, and stole the name from Xenoblade. A lot of his character and attitude was also taken from the character Joe in The Protomen, as someone trapped in a society he cannot understand and who is desperate to break out.

Even though he’s an energetic and friendly character on the surface, he’s still someone who carries a deep sadness within him. I wanted to incorporate “closed-off” aspects into his design. Details such as his loose, baggy pants and the scarf around his neck were meant to give a sense that he’s also someone who hides himself off. Whereas Penance has a covered upper body but open lower body, he was someone with a very open upper body and a more covered-up lower body. Penance is someone who is reserved and shuts people out, but who is surprisingly honest regarding her emotions, whereas Noah is seemingly outgoing and open, but actually uses that as a guise to hide the true depths of his self-loathing.

Creation Process

For Dragons Bleed Black, I primarily worked in an analog-to-digital process. My initial layouts were done digitally, and then I drew and inked the pages on paper. I then scanned in the finished lineart and finished the screentones and lettering digitally. Going into the project, I really wanted to finish a story of this scope in an analog format, so I’m glad I was able to do so.

I primarily drew on I-C brand B4 manga paper, and my lineart was primarily done using a Zebra brand Type Professional G-Pen nib. For brushes, I primarily used a Pentel brush pen and a Windsor & Newton Series 7 #2 Round Sable brush.

A large part of the process of making Dragons Bleed Black was doing research and broadening my horizons. For example, I came into the story knowing that I wanted to incorporate a lot of aesthetics and aspects of Catholicism and Catholic mythology into the story. However, I was someone who knew nothing about Catholicism. So, I decided to research various myths and beliefs, and studied various cathedrals to create my world and setting. The Milan Duomo was of particular inspiration to me for the great cathedral within the story. In particular, I knew that when drawing the cover, I wanted a strong sense of “stained glass” and a “halo”.

While working on this project, I also strove to expand my understanding of the world from an artistic standpoint. One of the main themes I found emerging as I wrote Dragons Bleed Black was an interrogation of modernity, where the characters and society within the story found themselves in conflict with tradition and old beliefs. I think that engaging more actively with authors such as Baudelaire and Battailes and Kafka helped me to deepen my understanding of these ideas, as well as better understand how the characters within the story might relate to the world around them. I also strove to engage with manga, film, and music—three of my main sources of inspiration—both with an open mind and a critical eye in order to try and better understand how other people see the world. In particular, the release of The Protomen’s Act III: This City Made Us while I was neck-deep in working on this project proved to be a huge turning point in my conceptualization.

When I began Dragons Bleed Black, I intended to create a self-contained one-shot that can stand alone as its own story. However, in the process, I figured out a lot about the world and setting, and have grand, sprawling ideas regarding the larger narrative that could sprout out of this one-shot. I hope to one day get a chance to continue this story and see through my entire vision.

My website

My Instagram