Dave Pryor - The Canine Crusader

Hello. This is Dave Pryor. Welcome to the creative process for the Canine Crusader, my contribution to the Art in the park superhero show. I'm honored to be part of the show, and I hope you enjoy listening to this creative process. 

I'm joined by Heather. Heather helped me with the creation of the character hand ideas that lent to this character. Heather's, my wife. Say hello. Hi. So we're both here together, and we're here with our two dogs, Ham and Cake, who also served as inspiration for the canine crusader. 

Yes, I did. So we started off with ideas for this project. We weren't sure what we were going to create. We knew it had to be a superhero, and we wanted it to be something that we could relate to. The first idea I had was a character about cinema. 

So we had a character that was dressed and looked like a movie theater at first. Yeah, because we go to the movies all the time, almost every week. So we thought that would be a good idea. The second idea was a character about dogs, superhero that loved dogs and cared for dogs. 

And so I did a few sketches, talked to Heather about which one we liked the most. And it's perfect for being in the park because dogs get walked in the park all the time. Yeah. So we decided to focus on that idea, and the canine crusader was born. 

But before she was called the canine crusader, we were using the term the dog lady because we knew she was a lady. We knew she liked dogs, but we hadn't come up with a catchy name yet. So the ideas ensued. 

We did some sketches. Well, originally. Going to be like an old lady with dogs. And she was carrying dogs. Dogs were in her hair, et cetera. So they were funny sketches. But I was passing some of the ideas past Heather, and she had some thoughts of her own. 

Yeah, I thought that had a kind of a derogatory vibe to it. It had cat lady tendencies, maybe a. Little bit too cat like. Yeah. And, I mean, while there is great that there are lots of ladies that have cats and people who have dogs and what have you, I think that this needed more of a go get them vibe. 

And there are people out there that have good vibes with their dogs. So she got youngened up, I guess you'd say, young and. Go get them vibes. So she became less of an old lady and more of a young lady who was taking care of a bunch of dogs at once and had a really strong persona to her.