Side-Story Bonus Art

Taking a break from Courtroom Antics for some kitchen antics.

Often artists make what could be described as official Fan Art. They draw scenes of the characters doing things that aren't actually in the work as such.

They could range from Beach Episodes to Christmas Scenes, to Fashion Shows, to Weddings of the Official Couples, to Alternate Universe settings, to Characters Switching Clothes, to cosplay fan art. Again, it's anything a fan artist might do (that's still acceptable for the rating of the work^note unless there is some official Rule 34 art), just by the actual artists of the work, or people officially hired to draw them.

Currently, this is a particularly widespread trope for anime and manga, seen in many online galleries and even in books that are collections of these. Many Webcomics have these as well, often in the form of "voteys" - bonus images which you get to see if you vote for that comic on one of the various comic-ranking sites.

While seldom seen today, this sort of material used to be a staple of American Comic Books (primarily in the Romance and Teen Humor genres, or any other comics with a significant female readership.) "Fashion Pin-Ups" showing the characters in different outfits were common, as were reader-submitted fashions — often redrawn by professional artists, with credit to the young designer.

A Sub-Trope of Bonus Material. Compare Staff-Created Fan Work, where staff create fanart without input from the main source.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a multifariousness of side-art made for spin-offs featuring characters engaging in battles that were not present in the original manga.
• One Piece animated some of these for its 12th intro, "Kaze wo Sagashite".
• The second intro of Naruto Shippuden has the characters in a modern school.
• The girls of Noir dressed up as Santa Claus with toy guns.
• Bleach loves doing this, to the point that most of the chapter covers have one or two pages featuring the cast just sitting around looking stylish. Possibly explained by the fact that the author has admitted that he's interested in pursuing a career in the fashion industry. This is made surreally hilarious by the fact that any and all costume changes almost have to happen outside of continuity - the overwhelming majority of Bleach characters belong to groups where the dress code is either a black with white highlights samurai outfit, or a very spartan white with black highlights suit. After a run of ten years featuring many characters, the number of those characters who have substantially altered their main outfit can quite literally be counted on one hand.
• Death Note: The Omake in the manga includes a day at the beach and a Christmas Special.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi occasionally has these.
  • The earlier ones are generally more Fanservice-y, (like having a few of the girls in swimsuits or a Happy Holidays Dress) but more recent ones feature stuff like group shots of Ala Alba looking badass.
  • Invoked/lampshaded in a Breather Episode chapter after the Kyoto Arc; it revolves around Asakura trying to take pictures for the Class Trip, resulting in a chapter that's full of these types of pictures.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: A boatload of artbooks and guidebooks feature Side-Story Bonus Art of the main cast in new clothing or activities.
• Several in the Lyrical Nanoha franchise. These range from pictures showing Riot Force Six during down time, to Nanoha, Fate, and Vivio having a family outing, to Nanoha and Fate (Or at least, the actors portraying them) doing a shoot for The Movie.
• Done for some covers of The Law of Ueki; one Beach Episode cover is mentioned in an omake inside as a weird dream a character had. (And another character mentions that she wouldn't be wearing her glasses in that situation.)
• Anything drawn by CLAMP gets lots of this. Usually, they feature the characters in Impossibly Cool Clothes (okay, more impossibly cool than some of the canonical outfits).
• Rumiko Takahashi indulges in this trope A LOT. But of particular note is Ranma ½, where she takes the chance to put the eponymous, self-assured and macho Gender Bender in extremely, uncharacteristically feminine clothes (or less) and settings and enjoying it —even the Cat Girl outfits! This is possibly deliberate, as a subversion of Fanservice and gender roles at the expense of fans and the character her[him]self, since Ranma vehemently DESPISES wearing feminine clothes or doing girly things unless it's for an ulterior motive, and even then she/he doesn't like it. Other characters, both in this series and others, get this treatment too, but it's not as unusual or surprising (or as common.)
• Naoko Takeuchi released five different collections of this of the Sailor Moon characters, one for each season. She liked drawing them in outer space, teleporting to Paris, or wearing princess outfits, swimsuits, bride's dresses, lingerie, just about anything out of the catalogs she had lying around her house.
• A lot of this was made during Danganronpa: The Animation's run, often for use in magazines (including some that were Summer and Halloween themed despite the game taking place no where near those dates).
• My Hero Academia usually relegates these to Horikoshi's Twitter rather than in the magazine. One notable magazine spread, however, gave the characters who won a popularity poll a fantasy-themed makeover. The concept proved so popular with fans that the anime even expanded the image into a full-blown Fantasy Alternate Universe for its second season ending theme.
• Durarara!! messes around with this a lot. Particularly with Izaya and Shizuo drawn together in various settings. However, the way it's drawn could confuse a new viewer as they occasionally appear to be either happy or at least comfortable with each other. This is the complete opposite of their normal behaviour in fact, the two despise each other and in the last few episodes try and outright murder each other via suffocation and No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Cool-Kyou Shinsha does this for most of his works on his Twitter and Pixiv accounts, even occasionally doing crossovers between them. One particular example even has a rare appearance of Kaoru and Hajime's daughter, Sayoko.

Comic Books

• Some early issues of ElfQuest had cartoons showing the elves living in Poughkeepsie with their creators the Pinis. One of the most telling had them jumping on Wendy Pini's bed early in the morning to wake her up.
• Fashion Pin-Ups, showing the characters in new outfits (either based on current fashion trends or reader designs) were a common "filler" feature in girl-targeted comics of the Silver Age and Bronze Age. Some typical examples (mostly of the "reader design" type) from Harvey's Bunny ("The Queen of the In-Crowd") comics can be seen in this Flickr collection.
• Superhero comics occasionally had these features as well. In the early '70s, DC Comics (no doubt realizing that a number of costumes designed in the '40s and '50s looked a bit dowdy by contemporary standards) sometimes showcased reader submissions:
  • Supergirl often asked her readers for costume designs, and even wound up wearing some of them in actual stories.
  • This wasn't exclusive to girls or girl-oriented comics. Robin was a frequent target for reader-designed costumes — here, for example.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes got the treatment too. Some of the reader-submitted costumes from Adventure Comics #403 even wound up becoming long-term outfits for the characters.

Fan Works

• Midnight Sleuth has various non-canon drawings made when the Tumblr host blogs reached a certain amount of followers. Most of the drawings in question are shippy in nature.

Films — Animation

• For Turning Red, Pixar has tweeted out some bonus art on special occasions like for Canadian Thanksgiving and New Years.

Video Games

• Advance Wars: Dual Strike has some bonus artwork like this, showing the cast in civilian clothes and driving around with a Cool Car.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Official bonus artwork displayed in the bonus art gallery shows Ann and Ayane sharing a photograph together. The main developers' Twitter features the two wearing New Years celebratory outfits.
• Azure Striker Gunvolt Series: The games' official sites and the Official Complete Works feature art of this sort, mostly made to celebrate some occasion (e.g. Halloween 2014). Many of them depict characters who are canonically mortal enemies palling around with each other.
• Blaster Master Zero III's soundtrack cover art has a pretty spoilerific one but one that needs some context to get: it shows Leibniz in casual clothes with Jason and Eve's kids all grown up.
• The Kirby series got a series of monthly bonus art pieces for its 25th anniversary Twitter.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic Jam had a lot of official artwork depicting Sonic and Co doing things like being at the beach, racing, having holidays, etc. Given how long the franchise has been going on he's probably done everything shown in the artwork now but at the time...well anyway you could use these as wallpaper if you inserted it into a CD-Rom on your computer.
  • Sonic Channel, the official Japanese site, contains art of Sonic and company doing tons of activities, ranging from dressing up for holidays to daily life activities.

Web Animation

• Spooky Month:
  • On Halloween 2021, Sr. Pelo posted a picture of Lila taking Skid, Pump, and Susie trick-or-treating, featuring most of the cast decked out in costumes.
  • On Mother's Day 2022, Sr. Pelo posted art of Skid giving Lila a drawing for Mother's Day, while Pump tries and fails to call his mom. A followup comic then depicts Susie telling him that he can mail their gift to their mom.
  • On Father's Day 2022, Sr. Pelo posted pictures of Pump and Susie at the post office handing off a gift for their dad, while Lila and Skid visit the cemetery.

Web Comics

• Drowtales official wallpaper site features main characters celebrating Halloween and Christmas. The production team also runs an fanservice paysite, so it's hardly surprising.
• The Warrior Christmas comic book. People try to read it as a story but it's really just a series of pinups.
• TwoKinds has the author's whole DeviantArt full of such images. (Some are NSFW, so they can't be seen without registering.)
• The Something*Positive 2002 Swimsuit Edition and assorted other work.
  R.K.Milholland:Here's a fun game! Seeing how all the characters are based (closely) on real people whom I call friends, start a dead pool to guess which of them will be the first to kill me for the swimsuit issue.
• In El Goonish Shive, the Sketchbook and Newspaper, with parts occasionally squirreled into the canon.
• Jet Dream (particularly in its It's Cookie! spinoff feature) often parodies both the "Fashion Pin-Up" and "Reader-Designed Costume" versions of comics pages circa 1970.
• Skin Horse periodically has non-canon one-off drawings of the characters having fun (or with Tip showing off a pretty dress).
• Ménage à 3 and its spinoffs, Sticky Dilly Buns and Sandra on the Rocks, generate a certain amount of this stuff, mostly as Print Bonus strips in the print collections and free postcards and such for purchasers of those books.
• On its website, The Order of the Stick has a few Side-Story Bonus Art available as computer, phone, or tablet backgrounds.
  • "No Encounters Today" shows the Order walking through a forest and, having Failed a Spot Check, oblivious to the amount of monsters preparing to ambush them. Probably non-canonical, as V has their hair up, which they didn't do until after the Soul Splice, and the Order has yet to go into an actual forest since then.
  • "Beach Party" is the Order's Beach Episode, with the members of the Order (as well as certain Azure City Paladins, Roy's sister Julia and girlfriend Celia, and Thor) enjoying a day at the beach. Almost definitely non-canon due to the fact that Julia has never met any of the Azure City Paladins, and Haley has her long hair (again), which happened long after they left the Paladins.
  • "Must Have Been Some Magic..." shows the Order fighting an evil Frosty expy. Non-canonical in that they only visited the snow after Durkon's vampirization, and he is a normal dwarf here.
  • "The Wrong Eye" shows the Order and the crew of the Mechane in a Indiana Jones-style goblin temple. Non-canonical in that they definitely didn't stop at any temples between Durkon's vampirization and Heel–Face Turn.
  • "Stick Trek" has the Order (and others) as the Bridge Crew of Star Trek: The Original Series. Non-canon for obvious reasons.
  • "Hel Polls for Thee": the final panel of the 1000th comic of the same name, and the only canon desktop featured.
  • "Pyrohydra" has the Order fighting a Hydra in a pool of lava. Non-canon based on the fact that Durkon had already been turned by the time Haley got her Northern Continent Armor.
  • "The Road Ahead" has the Order waking up to see the long day of hiking ahead of them. Non-canon for the same reason as the above.
• Yokoka's Quest has bonus wallpapers available to Ko-fi/Patreon supporters, and are later made available for free in the Ko-fi store. As well as general bonus art, these include less canon elements such as the characters wearing Christmas sweaters or characters as Pokémon trainers.

---