Then I thought “well those slippers look silly, let’s give him socks and tennis shoes like he wears in the other games”. Also, when I draw Scorpion’s eyes, I like to make sure they look like the very heavily shadowed ones with seemingly no eyebrows that he had in MK2, I think that captures his scary undead look the best. I always thought it was weird that he wore red in the first game and then suddenly switched to blue for every game after, so I wanted to draw him with a blue belt.

I made the head belong to a Masked Guard ’cause I like them but didn’t have any other place to draw ’em since they’re not name-characters. They’re both half-Chinese, half-white, but in my head Kuai Liang should always look a little bit more like John Turk so I figure his brother takes after their dad’s side more in the face. JOHNNY CAGE – Johnny was the first character I ever redesigned, before I even had it in my head to do every single one.

So going to a martial arts tournament in an outfit made for martial arts might not be entirely out of character for him, considering it’s also covered with mercenary gear like weapons and utility belts. I always thought that for his entrance into the tournament and first meetings with the heroes, he’d want to sort of keep his godhood a secret, the way Yoda pretends to be a simple-minded native when Luke first meets him on Dagobah, to test how Luke treats him and see if he’s a good person and how ready he is to learn.

Fans will be pleased to know that MKX includes costumes (skins) for Klassic character models such as Kitana and Mileena, as well as Tournament versions and some creepy looking Revenant versions for evil alternates. To make him look different from the other ninjas and specifically “Scorpion”-y, I gave him skull kneepads because Scorpion always wears skulls somewhere on himself as his specific logo, and his is the only one of the ninja costumes that has that diamond quilting pattern. You can still get her costume at any other time, but she might be somewhere else. You can tell right away when you look at it “that is definitely one of Shang’s guards”. Not a Sub-Zero or Reptile one for some reason. A couple years ago, I did a series of costume redesigns for the cast of Mortal Kombat 1. I never finished, only getting the main 7 and Reptile done, and I wasn’t really happy with my artistic abilities at the time or the way they were all face-forward like paper dolls, but they were quite popular nonetheless.