When I took on this project, my idea was to draw the story in a 1930’s/40’s newspaper comic strip style. I wanted to go for a cross between Milton Caniff and Roy Crane.

By the time I had done the character designs I’d dropped the idea of ape-ing a specific artists style, but what I kept was the idea of simplifying the facial details a-la Roy Crane and letting my cartoonier aspects out in a way I wouldn’t in a straight adventure strip. I also tried to reign in my Alex Raymond/ Hal Foster influenced inking style and go for a wetter, thicker style like Caniff. I’m not sure how successful I’ve been, but I think I emulated the feel of the era fairly well.

Here’s another sneak peek.

So I got hacked a couple of weeks ago.

After my host resolved the issue they recommended I update my WordPress install to the latest version to boost up security. So, I upgraded, only to find that my servers database won’t support the new version of WordPress. My service package is now on a “Legacy server” which my host isn’t bothering to upgrade, so if I want to upgrade WordPress I have to subscribe to a new more expensive package. Oh joy.

The long story even longer, is that to upgrade WordPress I had to turn off all plug-ins including my spam filter plug-in. By the time I’d decided to re-install the older version of WordPress and was able to get back into my control panel I had well over 800 pages of spam comments and counting. I spent about 2 hours clicking on the “select all comments” button then the “mark as spam” button. By the time I was nearing the end I was a little punch drunk and I accidentally selected a bunch of legitimate comments and deleted them with the spam. Oops!

Anyhoo, if your comment was one of the ones deleted, my apologies.

I’m trying to keep on top of the robot spam going forward so I won’t accidently delete real comments in a batch frenzy.

A couple weeks ago I finished up my last storyboard in a long run of consecutive shows. I enjoyed the work (and loved the money!) but by this time last year my comic work progress had pretty much slowed to a crawl.And I’ve had two comic projects on the side during that time.

At long last one of the two projects is getting close to wrapping up. I’m finalizing backgrounds on a 34 page short and I should be done some time next week.

I can’t show much as the project is a ways from coming out, but I can tell you that it is written by Eisner Award-nominated writer Derek McCulloch, is based on the short stories of Damon Runyon, and will be coming out from Image Comics sometime in the near-ish future. It’s a collection of short stories each drawn by a different artist and there are a few more stories to be completed so a release date isn’t available yet.

I can’t say much more than that, but here’s a sneak peak of a few panels  I finished up today.

Fresh off the tablet. I’m working out my inner Gene Colan in this sequence.

I pick away at pencilling a panel or two every morning when I’m not too swamped with deadlines. So far I’ve been managing about a page a week. At this pace I should be done the pencils some time in February!

Once I’ve started inking again, and get a few pages ahead, I’ll start posting the web comic again.