Ok, there is a story I????????m about to tell here???????Back in the day (college), my friend and I used to publish our own shoddy little local comic book to cover our relatively large bar tabs. What started as a small Sunday afternoon affair grew into a larger beast. We soon found ourselves making 200 print runs (keep in mind we were selling these by hand) and making reprints of our first issue. It actually ended up pulling in its own little underground following among the Calgary bar scene. To this day I still meet people who have read it or remember me selling them a copy and they tell me they keep it in their bathroom for reading material, etc.
The comic was called Rampage comics (under the company name Keggie Comics, based on a little situation where we stole a keg from the back of a bar???????but that????????s another story, anyway the keg became our mascot) and each issue featured two separate (but intertwined) stories. One was my story, and the other was my friend????????s. Each tale was loosely based on our own lives and since we did some pretty crazy stuff back in those days (he still does, but I toned down). Our alter egos were known as Hector and Fibber Fox. A few years after we killed the series (and our characters) we decided to pull a ???????Marvel??????? and bring them back to life???????sort of. The new adventures would chronicle the after life. Mine was based on Dante????????s The Divine Comedy. I described it to friends as Charlie Brown meets Alice and they drop some acid in wonderland. The work was heavily aesthetic and was inspired by Will Eisner and the Art Nouveau movement of the early 20th century and late 19th century. In fact it became rather surreal as the story was told primarily through imagery and I was more interested in creating lush compositions instead of a functioning paneled story. There were no panels to be seen.
I finished two and a half issues on 8x11 paper like we did the original but then decided to switch to a larger scale on better paper when I begun to get a little more into it. Alas the story remains incomplete three years after the fact. However, I feel many of the pages work as stand alone illustrations so I decided to ink some of my favorites about a year ago, and now I am scanning them onto the PC to colour them. This is part 2 in a 3 part triptych that I eventually hope to fully complete in colour. (So please don????????t take any of these and colour them???????not that you????????re going to)
Feel free to visit the
Gallery of sketches and the original 8 ???? x 11 pages that I eventually scrappedIt isn????????t all of the pages, and they are in no order what so ever.
Enjoy.