World of Tanks Mercenaries recently added three special new tanks for a limited time. From the mind of acclaimed artist Brett Parson (Tank Girl) and created in partnership with ARTitiude, these tanks, dubbed The Outcasts are pretty wild.
The Outcasts are available now until December 11. The Outcasts are;
- Banana Buster – a deliberate brawler with awesome armour. It’s captained by 40 Watt Club, a French Resistance fighter who delights in hunting down members of German high command!
- Beach Party – the resilient hybrid of three nations’ engineering prowess, it’s fronted with a magnificently powerful weapon. Battalion 23, an American soldier who went mad surviving and fighting his way through the forests of Japan after World War II, is at its helm.
- T.A.N.K. – this absolute unit has excellent speed, agility, and close-range combat prowess. The Buck is its master, a cruel and vindictive war criminal who operates a nefarious network of Mercenaries who sweep Europe like a plague of locusts.
ARTitude Worldof Tanks
We recently had the chance to chat with Frédéric Claquin from ARTitutde about working with Parson and on World of Tanks Mercenaries.
PowerUp! – How did you get involved with WoT Mercenaries?
Frédéric Claquin – We started to work last year with WoT Mercenaries doing alternative posters with fou artists from the ARTtitude collective.
Another one also did a set of custom WoT Xbox. The posters we did were all amazing but one artist did something very interesting; Brett Parson.
He’s currently doing the Tank Girl comics with Alan Martin so tanks and crazy characters are something he’s really comfortable with.
PU! – How did you approach the designs, did you have a brief from Wargaming?
Claquin – No, that’s what’s really cool with Wargaming, they let us do what we wanted. No brief, no boundaries. So we had a chat with Brett and ended up with these three characters.
We imagined we were allowed to create a WoT Mercenaries comic book and thought of what kind of characters would we want to create. We ended up with those three.
For the tanks, Wargaming gave us three models and it was like the characters, no brief no boundaries, just madness and good fun.
ARTitude World of Tanks & Brett Parson
PU! – What are the biggest influences on the artwork and the three outcasts?
Claquin- You know, with Brett, we really like vintage comics, action movies from the 80′, classic anti-heroes like Snake Plissken or Jake Burton, zombies, weirdos and monsters.
So we ended up with these three outcasts who would also fit perfectly in Grindhouses movies and all the stuff we like from the cradle of pop culture.
PU! – Are you a gamer, if so, what do you play?
Claquin – I used to play a lot when I was a teenager. I started on PC at the end of the ’80s, then with the 8bit generation till current console generations.
Now I have less time, so I’m more into cool adventures games. And I’m also into retrogaming, playing vintage stuff at home with some friends on one of our ARTtitude arcade cabinets; we have a collection with Neo Legend.
It’s so cool to feel like being at Flynn’s, hanging with some classic music from the ’70s and ’80s, beer and pizzas!
ARTitude
PU! – Would you ever consider working on your own original video game?
Claquin – We’d love to. You know ARTtitude is not just about art books when it comes to publishing.
We will soon release our first vynl album (synthwave, retro sounds …), our first graphic novel with Myriam Catrin and our first card game. All of them produced with artists from the collective.
So working on our own video game would be so cool and logical based on ARTtitude’s DNA and my own path in the industry. And we’re all gamers at different levels.
But unless we find a publisher who would produce it with us, this would remain a crazy idea. If you know a publisher interested, you got my email!
Huge thanks to Frédéric Claquin, ARTitude and Wargaming.
