Westminster Wakeman Series

The Westminster Wakeman Series is an ongoing series that currently has 4 finished volumes. It's currently in hiatus.

History
The Westminster Wakeman series came to be after Velvet Bullet played the game Persona 5, read the manga [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katsu! Katsu!] and watched Alfred J. Kwak, Cowboy Bebop and a few Lupin III specials, movies and series. He wanted to create something that payed a tribute to all of these stories but could still be its own thing.

The first idea was about a bounty hunter in space who was part of an immortal alien species, but didn't know it. This idea was scrapped within a day.

Characters
The idea for the main character to be an outlaw came from the Lupin III series, which the series borrows the most from. His companions would consist of people who would be helpful to a master criminal, like an escape artist and someone who could cause a good distraction. Aurora was introduced as a female presence in the entirely male cast. Ryunosuke was originally supposed to be a supporting character in another comic by Velvet Bullet, Malone Mysteries: The Deadly Locket (In Malone Mysteries, Ryunosuke was going to act as an inspector who constantly tried to keep the main characters, two private detectives, off the crime-scenes he was in charge of. He was way more stern and bitter than he is in the Wakeman series, and he certainly wasn't comic-relief). But since The Deadly Locket was never finished and Velvet Bullet liked the character of Ryunosuke so much, he was written into this series instead as a sort of Zenigata for Wakeman's Lupin.

The story was originally going to take place in 2010, but because of a growing fascination with the '60s, Velvet Bullet desided to let it take place in 196X, which could be any year from 1960 to 1969.

Velvet Bullet asked a friend of his for surnames that sounded cool. The response was a list of names, one of which was "Wakeman". The name Washington emediately popped into his head and he planned to call his main character that. But the name sounded too American, and he wanted the nationality of his protagonist to be a bit of a mystery. That's why he chose Westminster instead, which is a city in America, a suburb in Australia, a village in South-Africa and a district in England.

Pilot
Velvet Bullet started working on a first comic which would contain one 20 page long story called Het Koeriers Complot (Dutch for "The Courier Conspiracy") which he never finished. This is now known as the Pilot Comic. The main characters in the comic are the regular Westminster Four and Inspector Ryunosuke. prototypes for Sharon Stanford (under a different name) and a man who's character resembles Hildebrand's (named Dr. Xiang). The pilot also has a slightly different artstyle and character design from the eventual series (for example: Ryunosuke wears a bow-tie instead of a regular tie, Westminster has bags under his eyes and Sharon Stanford wears a big sun hat inside).

The Blue Series
In october 2018 he finally started working on the real first volume which he finished in less than 3 weeks. He didn't plan on writing more volumes. But he felt like the story didn't have a satisfying ending with Wakeman and his friends in jail. And especially not after how easily they got arrested.

Volume 2 (which mostly centered about the Duke of Etteren Arc) was written during the pre-production of the The Duke of Etteren Brickfilm. Velvet Bullet didn't want the stories to be exactly the same so he chose to add less information into the comic version. But he himself considers the brickfilm to be the better of the two versions.

Volume 3 had a rough start. Velvet Bullet wasn't feeling it and didn't know where to start. After he landed the part of Professor Callahan in an amateur production of the Legally Blonde Musical, he decided to create a character based upon the coldblooded university professor/defense attorney, since it could go hand in hand with Wakeman's status as a criminal. From there on, the volume just wrote itself.

Volume 4 felt like the end for Velvet Bullet. He found chapter 24 the perfect ending for the first series of volumes. As it ended where the first chapter started, at the mansion of the DeDammes. But since he had room left for another one, he added chapter 25 to the volume. Which he had rather added to the next volume.

By the time volume 5 was written, Velvet Bullet had a writers block. Causing him to take over a year to finish the volume.

The Red Series
After the miserable volume 5, Velvet Bullet wanted to change the tone. He wanted to finish the series and made volume 6 the darkest of them all. Nudity and violence were no longer an issue and the darker side of the characters showed up.

Volume 7 will probably the end of the Wakeman series for now. But we never know what the future may bring.