I’ve been keeping a separate comp file of my published work since my first comic Elflord Vol. 1 #6 came out 34 years ago this month.

I apparently haven’t been very diligent about filing comps as there are a fair number of issues missing, and I forgot about the file after I “got out” of comics in 2000 (when I went in to animation) and the publications slowed down. It took a few minutes to cobble together this stack from various shelves, and I’m too lazy to go digging in the actual comic book collection longboxes for the missing singles, so this is what I’ve got!

There are probably close to a dozen single issues missing and most noticeably I don’t have copies of any of the collected editions of my Elfquest work, from the WaRP Graphics reader collections, the DC collections, or the most recent Dark Horse collections that have compiled about half my output for them at this time.

What is also missing are the two daily webcomics I did for a cumulative 14 months, and all of the unpublished pitches and complete projects that will never see print, or won’t see print for a long while.

But I digress…

For a long time I’ve been feeling sorry for myself that I haven’t been able to work in comics full time (and make a real living) in 20 years (until this past year) and I’ve been lamenting how little work I’ve produced in that time.

But I did a little bit of quick math, and I’ve produced a fair amount of pages since the summer of ’86 accounting for a conservative estimate of a cumulative 10 years of full time work.

I have inked a conservative 1154 pages of published work and pencilled and inked (and sometimes written & coloured) 994 pages since “going pro”. Not all of those full art pages have seen print, and some will never see print, but that is the nature of creative work.

I’ll never be able to get an accurate page count as so much of my work at Aircel was as an assistant, and I haven’t even considered the amount of time I’ve put in as a production designer and publisher. And I’m not going to go digging to pull up all of the abandoned tryouts and sampe pages I worked on in down times.

If you average it out, that’s 63 pages of comic art a year for the last 34 years. If I’d produced 120 pages a year, I’d consider that a decent career.

I can’t account for every moment of the rest of that time. I’ve spent a cumulative 15 years in animation. I spent 1 year as a “full time” musician at 22 (ie didn’t have another job even though I should have had) two and a half years cumulatively working service jobs and I’m sure another cumulative year staring at the ceiling thinking “what’s next?”. I could probably count writing out this post in that category. Oh, and I was still in High School for the first year of my “pro” career.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, but the goal is to draw comics full time from now until I retire/croak. If I could do 120 pages of full art a year for the rest of that time I would be a happy cartoonist.

I’ve currently got 20 pages of Wip stuff going and a script for a 28 pager I’m going to start soon enough, so only time will tell…

Okay, there are no swords in this one, but there is sorcery!

I was given the opportunity back in ’97 to contribute stories to the Fantasy anthology Mythography. This was my second story, and my longest.

When I created Sîan I was reading a lot of Red Sonja and watching Xena. I wanted to create a female Sword & Sorcery adventure character   that was realistic with no super powers or goddess bestowed strength and powers. Her costume design is meant to be practical and functional, at least for the cat burgling during the hot summer months of the Mediterranean-like city she is employed in during this story. She doesn’t go out in public dressed like that unless hid under her cloak! And her outfit will change depending on the situation and adventure. Her hair style is the true signature costume.

And, yes, there are some elements in the beginning of the story that might seem a little misogynistic, especially Sîan’s own attitude toward her gender. Her city is meant to be a Hyborian age pre-empire Roman-like city state, and women are not equal citizens so her own belief in the equality of the sexes might not be up to modern standards, at least at this early stage of her career. And… I was working backwards initially from a joke twist ending that required her to be willing and eager to take the Wizard’s offer of turning her into a man! When I decided to play the story a little more straight, and leave Sîan intact as a female character I could use in further stories, I still needed her to be frustrated enough with her being trapped in a world where women are not considered equal to be  believable that she would jump at that offer. I put her through the wringer to get her there, though!

Read through to the end. I promise the pay off is good.

And, while I never thought it would be a twenty year break, Sîan will return! I’ve got plenty more stories to tell.

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!

I’m researching crowdfunding at the moment as I’m thinking of running a Kickstarter for Wahoo Morris Book 2 this year.

As part of the research I’m participating in the 5 day ComixLaunch Kickstarter Challenge.

Day 1 the challenge was to streamline and write your bio. Not too hard. Done.