My poor apple boy looks more like a buck-toothed Link now. Annie would have pointy ears under her bonnet too. I see them more tied with old timey fae lore.

Johnny’s summoned with that glowy appleseed, and controlled with one or two marionette controllers, though he has an issue with passiveness, and tends to respond to the slightest threat from miss as-yet-unnamed witch here.

At some point witch-lady will make Johnny go all berserker-mode on the folk trying to rescue him, and he won’t like that one bit. Well, internally.

I need to draw Edison’s bull mode. Any excuse to draw bovine!

A couple of protagonists from the appleseed story, which I’ll now tag as pocket full of rye. I’ve decided these summoned spirits are not the historical figures themselves, but embodied ideals. So the gal here is a vague nod to Annie Oakley and other sharpshooters of the west. The actual Annie definitely wasn’t as frilly as this, but dangit I like decorative clothing. It’s also a smallish nod to the pink Annie from the SNES game Wild Guns.

The fella is a young warlock (Edison) that crossed the antagonist (previously mentioned witch), and as a result, was trapped in his animal shape (texas longhorn), mind-wiped and kept among the witch’s herd of cattle for several years, up until Annie freed him and restored his memories. He keeps his ear tag to remain focused on ending the witch, though Annie is only interested in breaking the bonds on her fellow spirit and close friend, Johnny.

Another story I had involved legend characters from the tall tales setting, or something close. It’d be one of the few times I’d include a modern setting, as nothing bores me more than every day locations with every day humans. But! It would begin and center around the daughter of a dairy farmer who’d practice witchcraft in private. At some point she’d learn how to summon certain spirits, or she’d stumbled upon a relic relating to western folklore, and call up Johnny Appleseed himself. Well, I haven’t decided if it would be actually him, or some embodiment of his ideals. In any case, usually only druids would summon him to help regrow a recently charred forest, but the witch has other plans.

Johnny would be a kinda’ aw-shucks/Fixit Felix character, and politely try to unsummon himself, but this witch’s relic keeps him around, and allows her to switch on a chaotic state in which he cannot deny her commands. The two of them wreak havoc in some manner, likely in the name of justice, and then we’d introduce the protagonist(s), which I’m not sure of yet. I wanted to bring in some representation of Annie Oakley and/or Pecos Bill, and respective witches and warlocks that summon them willingly.

I have a vague image of Johnny’s witch in my head, and I’ll scribble her up at some point.