I’m going through my archives, scanning in old artwork, looking for short stories  and pinups and sketches to publish.

Every once in a while I come across an oddity I had forgotten about.

This one comes from the summer of 1997. I got offered the “opportunity” to work on a Double Impact/Luxura cross over comic. I didn’t know anything about Luxura other than she was a 90’s bad girl vampire character but Double Impact I was a little more familiar with as I had read about their initial sales success and flipped through the odd issue in my Local Comic Shop.

It wasn’t my cup of tea, but back in those days I’d draw pretty much anything for cash if I had the room in my schedule, and the page rate was okay, so I agreed to do the job.

I should have been tipped off that it was not going to go well when they started sending the script two or three pages at a time and blaming MY fax machine for cutting out. I asked them to send the script to a commercial fax machine at my local Mail Boxes Etc. and the “issues with MY fax machine” continued as they continued to send it a few pages at a time. Pages were coming in so slowly that I was worried I wasn’t going to hit the deadline.

And… the script was the most illiterate piece of trash I have ever seen, being almost unreadable!

But I persisted.

When the book finally came out, half the dialogue was different than the script, even ignoring the flow of the art, dropping jokes that were in the script that I had played up well. It read like someone had made up the dialogue on the spot just looking at the art.

I believe I did this story under a page a day schedule, which for my style is quite tight. I’m more of a pencil a page a day / ink a page a day kind of guy. But I got it done and in by the deadline. They were thrilled and solicited a two issue mini with me listed as the artist.

But…. the payment deadline passed with no check. Another month passed, then another month and they kept making excuses and putting me off. Eventually the publisher told me the book was in the red and he couldn’t pay me, and to add insult to injury, he claimed the editor had stolen a whole bunch of art including my pages.

So, I never got payed, had my art stolen, and had to buy a copy of the comic off the racks so I would have a record of the job. Fortunately I had the foresight to photocopy the whole job before mailing it.

And they were upset when I told them I wasn’t doing the follow up mini until I got paid for the first job.

Oh well. I eventually wrote the whole thing off as a bad debt on my taxes, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Oddly enough, I actually kind of enjoyed doing the job, as it was the closest to “Commercial Big Two”  work I had ever done at that point. And looking back, I’m embarrassed by the “Bad Girl” subject matter, but I think I did an OK job all things considered!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2017 at 8:02 am and is filed under Art, Comics, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.