Dear Insane Children, 

We’re making good progress on the Asylum narrative. And there have been a couple of evocative scenes illustrated by our art team I think speak to the beauty and depth of the world we’re building. 

I am loving the images created by Adam for Alice’s exploration of the Memory Mines. Among the scenes she’ll explore, there’s a section dealing with Dr. Bumby, and these have resulted in a couple of the more beautiful and chilling images to come from the project so far… 

It’s the sign of a good antagonist that we can be fascinated and repulsed at the same time. 

“Hush now, Alice. You’ve told your tale. It’s time to listen to something new. I was once like you. Born in chaos – an orphan… of sorts. Mummy was mad, insane really… laudanum, hysteria, and carnal urges. Pa? A taxidermist. Obsessed with restoring life to the dead. His mistake? The dead can only rot. Like mummy rotted. But the living? The living can be made clean. Dolls are clean. That’s the trick, girl. The moonbeam magic. Start from within and make everything clean. Clean and hollow. 

Our minds – that is where the cleansing must occur. You’re an excellent example. Spattered in blood and covered in arcane symbols. Wearing chaos like a badge of honor. But you know nothing of chaos. If you did, you’d do as I’ve done, and dedicate your life to its complete eradication. That blade you ram through your enemies? An instrument of filth and corruption. It does not sterilize. Quite the opposite. It spreads filth and horror from whatever it touches. Just like Pa. That’s your mistake too.

Do you really think you killed me? The taxidermist might agree. But we’re beyond all that. No, Alice, we’re in the realm of Mr. Dream Man. Sing with me, Alice… 

The train is coming with its shiny cars.
With comfy seats and wheels of stars.
So hush my little ones have no fear.
The man in the moon is the engineer.”

He is dead… right?? 

From Shanghai with Shiny Cars, 

-American 

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here to just give you the sad news that there will be no regularly scheduled stream tomorrow.

American has just done a little family travelling these last few days and add this to the insane amount of work that’s going on with Mysterious/Alice/Oz/Redacted stuff, we just need a bit more of a breather and time to catch up.
Sorry about that.

Fret not though, we WILL be back next week where there’ll be even more art, design, discussion, prizes and all the usual shennanigans.

As an apology, please cast your eyeballs all over this new image by Omri called “Expelled”.
Pretty darn incredible, right?   🙂

– Cheers

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here, letting you all know about a live-stream that’s happening at at 7PM PST on Thursday April 2nd for a Crowd Design session where we’ll review and discuss the latest Plushie Dreadful designs and samples.

You can watch the stream on both…
Twitch.tv/americanmcgee
YouTube.com/americanmcgeeofficial

Unfortunately, I won’t be there (although I will be in chat), but there will be American, Yan and @pixelbrandjeans (Jen) and a collection of Plush samples, designs, and ideas, and we want YOU at the design table!

Hope to see you tomorrow, and be sure to bring all your opinions and hottest takes!

– Cheers

Dear Insane Children, 

A few posts back, I shared a snippet from Monday (the online collaboration platform our pre-production uses to organize all their work)*** – where you could see my story text being converted into sketches and illustrations. All that content will eventually make its way into the Design Bible… 

Anyway, that post featured a scene where Alice is banished from the Home For Wayward Children (HFWC) after the killing of Bumby. It’s described as… 

Art Brief: This scene will showcase Alice being removed from Bumby’s Home for Wayward Children by Radcliffe and the Police. Alice will be thrown out onto the street, and expelled. The home’s resources are cut off to her, and she will not be able to protect the other orphans left behind.

The scene is meant to capture the feeling of “a mother separated from her children, and being unable to protect them”.

Click back a few posts if you want to check that out. 

Today, Omri sends along some updates to the content being created under that heading.

The initial concept has split in two. First, there’s the scene as it was requested initially. 

And then there’s … something … dark and sinister … being created alongside the original request. See the latest from Omri (main image above). 

For the original scene… 

It started out as a rough sketch. And then progressed… 

With more of the surrounding details being filled in. 

Omri says he has an actual (living) model coming over these days to act as a stand-in for Alice in this scene. Wow. 

Can’t wait to see the final renders of all this amazing work! 

Let us know in the comments below what you think! And be sure to send Omri some love!

*** A Note Regarding Monday: In a recent live stream, I floated the idea that we might open up public access to Monday. That would allow our Insane Children to browse through (read-only) the work being done by our pre-production team. Upon further research of the topic, we’ve discovered that Monday doesn’t have this sort of feature. The platform costs $$ per “seat” and there’s no such thing as a “view-only” seat. Combine that with concerns raised by the team about making their work too-public, too soon… and we’ve decided to kill this idea. But I will continue to copy/paste interesting sections from Monday and share them here on Patreon. 

From Shanghai with Weirdo Content, 

-American

Dear Insane Children, 

I thought he was dead! You did too! We all saw Alice push him under that train… 

But don’t worry! We will NOT be bringing Bumby back to life in Alice: Asylum. I promise he’s dead and will remain so. Except… The Dollmaker. He’s going to make an appearance. Yikes.

This will happen when Alice explores the memories stored in the Memory Mines (temporary name for this location). She will discover a number of critical memory/scenes including… 

A) Scene: Early Life. Home, family, and fire-related. The Fire. Alice’s family. Burning toys and beds. Children playing and laughing. Memorable moments from early childhood. Scenes with characters who once visited and left an impression – Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage. Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.

B) Scene: The hospital. Flashes of the night Alice was taken to the hospital. Scale is distorted to create a sense of disorientation, smallness, and distance. Giant beds, warped hospital rooms, giant scalpels, her family (relatives) tiny and far away (in the sky looking down on her among lots of other giant faces), massive pill bottles. Gauze for clouds. Trolleys. Dead bodies under covers. What did Alice fear most about this period, these scenes? The lack of family? Not knowing where she was? Feeling lost and alone? Feeling small. Again, Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage, saying, “insanity is the best option.” Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.

C) Scene: The Asylum. Long, dark corridors of prison-like doors. Straight jackets. Screaming. Padded rooms. Strange “mental health” contraptions. More assortments of “tools” and nurses, doctors, inmates, etc. Bumby and Radcliffe take center stage. Alice overhears conversation critical to her quest.

D) Scene: London/HFMC related. Insane Children, broken children, broken toys, therapy (infernal train, forgetting, seeing something strange happening with other children in the home).

E) Scene: Bumby related. Dollmaker stuff, scissors, thread, needles, tools of his trade. Combined with brains, open skulls, other concepts related to brainwashing and prepping these children for his plans. All of this takes place inside an environment of dark woods, open black spaces, and conveyor belts of children’s dolls. (See the dark dollmaker illustrations from AMR).

F) Scene: London and the Train Station. Elements from the London street; butchers, police, thieves, filth, and depravity in the East End. Alice pushing Bumby under the train.

The images in this post are focused entirely on the recollection of The Dollmaker encounters. 

The idea being that these powerful negative memories have been saved from recycling by Shadow Alice. 

She visits these painful scenes over and over – feeding off the negative emotions they generate. 

Another amazing batch of illustrations from Adam! 

Since these are “just” memories… should Alice be able to destroy them? That might be a bit of fun – we could construct these out of some flimsy-magical material and allow Alice to bash her way through these areas… ensuring that the dark energy they contain can never be used again. Hmmm.

Let us know in the comments below what you think of Alice revisiting these dark scenes.

From The Shadows, 

-American

Dear Insane Children, 

Font Lord here to tell you 2 things.

1) There’s only 2 days to go before April hits and it’ll be too late to change your tier to $75 if you’re currently thinking about taking part in the super ‘Double Print Month‘.
DON’T MISS OUT on these 2 fantastic prints !!
(And you’ll also get a Hysteria Rabbit if you’ve not had one before at that tier)

2) Last week we had lots of fun doing our livestream over on Twitch/Youtube.
As usual, Madness Returns was played, art was discussed, prizes were given, plushies were fawned over, but also, what happened exactly to make us do that in the top image of this post? 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=060cpm8kXt0

– Cheers