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!

It’s been 9 years since this project was shelved, so I’m guessing it’s okay to show by now!

After The Mighty Motor Sapiens wrapped, Mark Wheatley was trying to secure a follow up project to keep the team employed. He secured interest from a Horror website for a daily webcomic and we put together the following pitch.

We got a greenlight, but before we could celebrate, in fact the very next day, we got word the guy who greenlit the project was fired and the project was dead!

While I was disappointment I wouldn’t keep working with Mark, MJ, and Jerry, I’ll admit I was a little… unhappy…. with the movies we were planning on parodying. I’m not a fan of slasher flicks and I’m not sure what it would have done to my psyche to have to sit through multiple viewings of movies like Hostel every week!

Still, I miss getting to cartoon in this style.

I’m working my way through a back-log of covers.

I’ve had multiple books ready to go but just waiting for a cover.

I have finished the line art for the  final 3 issues of digital Wahoo Morris comics and a collection of some Weird Science-Fantasy short stories for Comixology.

Now I need to colour these…. and I still need a cover for a print book collecting my random short stories and a cover to a book collection of pin-ups, art, and sketches.

Covers unfortunately are not my favorite task!

On Tuesday I put the finished bits of ‘ink’ on the final interior page of Wahoo Morris.

I’m not popping the champagne quite yet.

I still have 3 covers to do for the Comixology releases and I have to copy edit the whole book and put together a print ready file for Book 2. That’s a lot of work. And I have to somehow find the time for it in between storyboard assignments.

But… for the first time  in 17 years I find myself without an in progress comic project to pick away at between assignments. And I’m finding that less of a relief than I thought.

This might be a good time for editors to hit me up for work. 🙂

The word came yesterday that The Damon Runyon Graphic Library project is dead. An agreement couldn’t be made with the new person in charge at the rights holder.

It’s heartbreaking burying a project. I think this would have been a beautiful book and I was very proud of this story. Sure, I can show the art, but that’s only half the story without the words.

Sigh…..

Anyway, here is all 33 pages of the black & white linework