I drew 3 original stories in ’93.

Story number 2 was a Gothic Vampire story (itself a redraw of an idea I developed and drew one page of 4 years earlier) that never made it past the layout loose pencil stage. I also stopped on page 13 without finishing the story and as I have no layouts or script in my files I imagine I was kind of making it up as I went along. I remember having fun doing it, but it was largely an exercise in doing single source lighting. Lots of extreme shadow and candle light!

I can only assume I moved on to “The Party” (story # 3 that I finished in December of this year) because I wanted samples to get work and figured a retro Gothic horror story wasn’t going to get me work at Marvel or DC, so on to the to the idea with super-hero action in it!

Anyway, I’ve pulled out “The Vampire Story” periodically with the intention of finishing it, most recently the intention was to draw it from scratch using the original as a springboard, but there were a handful of poses I still like even 30 years on. Having finished “The Party” and still not having anything definite to work on I decided to import the original pages into Clip Studio, quickly trace them off, then start moving, cutting and adding.

3 days later I have an expanded 18 page story roughed out, and surprisingly I’ve kept most of the original work though I had to move and resize a lot of it. Though, by the time I finish this will look like a new story even if the idea and some of the layouts/posing are 30 years old!

Next, I have to write a script and do rough lettering and solidifying of the layouts before diving into the full pencils.

More soon!

I found myself with a few days before Christmas with nothing to work on, and I didn’t really have the brainpower to start something new.

Now, I like to have a procrastination project on the go at all times so if I’m frustrated with whatever I’m supposed to be working on I can procrastinate with something semi-practical. And, a few years ago I scanned in a bunch of old unfinished short stories and set them up in Clip Studio for this purpose. I’ve finished three of them over the past few years, so I opened up the two remaining (that are ready in CSP) to see if I could get into either one.

One is an 8 page Wahoo Morris short that was written to be the backup in the Image version of Wahoo Morris. It’s only layouts and lettering, so requires a complete pencil job, which wasn’t what I had the brain power for.

The other one is a 12 pager I wrote and drew summer of ’93 as samples to try and get work. I’d rededicated myself to art and comics mid ’92 and was determined to get better and break in! I drew 3 original short comics between February and August (instead of X-men and Hulk pages which I did plenty of in ’92) and mid-way through the second story something clicked and my anatomy and drawing made a huge leap and crossed a line into what is recognizable as my semi-ready to be professional style. Still lots of flaws, but I was starting to get there! It’s not much of a story, opening at a house party populated by people I know (including an overly idealized version of myself) when superbeings smash through the window, smash up the place and leave. I was basically trying to prove I could draw real people doing real things AND superhero fights.

I inked the first 4 pages, tightly pencilled 2, and there rest was in various stages of unfinished pencils and some inks on page 12. had to stop working on it as I took a second day job in September that was a term contract, with the intention of using the money to head to conventions and meet editors, but, by the time the term job ended and I could get back to the story it was Christmas, then I was on my way to Poughkeepsie and a year of working on Elfquest comics.

I pulled out the pages in ’94, but by the time I started sending out samples again in ’95, I was a lot better, so it sat unfinished.Every once in a while I would pull it out with the intention of finishing it for publishing, but again, there’s not much story to it, and some of the “plot” of the frame is inside jokes that only a certain handful of friends would have found funny 30 years ago.

And the superhero action is rather claustrophobic, being done in mid-shots the whole way through, never pulling back to show the action and where it took place. Given that the fight is in the living room of an apartment building I think that’s sem-appropriate, but there were a few spots where things are a little unclear, and one transition that was very unclear.

Anyway… all that to say, just before Christmas I opened it up and started inking a bit, not really intending to get very far, but I inked some more, then some more, then in a day or two I found I’d run out of fully pencilled figures to ink and had to pull out a pencil and fill in the backgrounds, background characters (party goers trying to get out of the way of the action), and one or two panels of the main action I had to pencil fully from scribbles.

Next thing I knew, I was done the existing pages, then got the idea of adding a splash page to help with the one potentially confusing transition. It didn’t fully fix things, but again, it was fun to do which is the important thing!

In conclusion it was fun inking super-heroes (something I haven’t tried in 20 plus years) and it was interesting inking my 30 year younger self. There was plenty of iffy anatomy, especially with the muscle-bound super-beings (which I’m still not that great at drawing), but nothing that a more experienced inker couldn’t fix or polish up on the fly. Now I have to figure out what I’m going to do with this thing now that it’s done!