Original IP, built in public, over five years
- Role
- Creative direction · Original IP · Community
- Disciplines
- Original IP · World Building · Visual Identity · Creative Direction · Community
- Summary
- An original character universe with a comic, a cast, a game, a collectibles line and a community — incorporated in 2021 and still running. It is the project where the habits everything else depends on were formed.
Where the habits came from
Sanshu is the oldest thing here and the reason the rest works. It began in 2021 as a character and a name, incorporated the same year, and grew into a universe with a comic, a canonical cast, a game, a collectibles line and a community that showed up for it.
It is also where the working method was learned. Directing artists towards a house style, keeping a canon consistent across years and contributors, deciding what is on-model and what is not, and building an audience for a world before that world is finished — every one of those is a Blackbird skill, and every one of them was learned here first, slowly and at my own expense.
The Myth of Sanshu — the narrative spine, with a written first story arc. Artwork produced by commissioned artists working to the world's visual direction.
Two timelines, one world
The universe runs on two tracks. The Myth of Sanshu is the ancient layer — the lore, the yokai, the mythic conflict. Sanshu Pals are the present-day layer: kids who discover that lore, with the collectible characters doubling as an in-story subplot, so that the thing fans collect in the real world is the same thing the characters collect inside the fiction.
That symmetry is the strongest idea in the project. It means the merchandise layer is not a merchandise layer — it is canon, and every addition to it advances the story rather than diluting it.
Model sheets, years before I needed them
Full-body views, expression sets, accessory callouts and a locked palette — specified so that any artist commissioned later draws the same character. This is the same document I would rebuild for Blackbird years afterwards, for the same reason: a character you cannot reproduce is a character you cannot cast.
What it grew into
A comic with a written first arc. A collectibles line with its own trailer. A playable game. A real-time interface test in a game engine. Character editors, sticker sets, a subreddit and a community that named itself.
Sanshu also has a chapter in Web3 — the project raised and organised around a token and a foundation, and that period funded much of the world-building. It is part of the honest history rather than the pitch: the durable asset was never the token, it was the cast, the lore and the people who stayed for them.
Made with other people
Very little of the Sanshu artwork is drawn by my hand, and that is the point of including it. My role was the one that scales: establishing the world, holding the canon, commissioning and directing artists, and keeping a visual identity coherent across years and many contributors.
It is the same job as directing an animated series. The tooling changed; the work did not.
What this demonstrates
- Creative Direction
- World Building
- Visual Identity
- Community Building
- IP Development
- Long-Horizon Production
Next project
Blackbird
An animated series, and the production system built to make it possible