Rarities and Unseen Material

I’ve been making comics since I was about 9. It kills me that I have nothing earlier than from when I was 13. My first comic was a spin off from The Bash Street Kids about Fatty’s cousin who was actually fatter than Fatty. The whole thing hinged on only being able to see the character’s hat from a window until the big reveal two pages later.

Then I had the Batman and TMNT inspired Ninja Pig vs Colossal Clown when I was 12 and another highly derivative comic about my brother Poncho’s cat and a blue mouse very similar to Itchy and Scratchy around the same time. I had lots of stories that never made it past a page but it was good training. My Dad who is a creative powerhouse in his own right sat me down one night and showed me how to rule up a page and even photocopied a bunch of different panel layouts for me and bought me a folder to keep them all in. Since then I got serious about making comics.

But not serious enough to keep any of the originals….

The selection here is from 1998-2000.  Poncho was always years ahead of me in technology and even drawing at one stage. He took one of my finished pages, scanned it in and coloured and it blew my mind. I just couldn’t believe how much the computer could shave time off and cover up my bad drawings. We only had Corel Photopaint 6 for years and it was only 2007 when I started using Adobe products.

After finishing school and doing a lame ‘art course’ for a while I had a few months off before necessity dictated I get a job, I broke my back trying to draw my first epic MOTUKA.  Painfully slow going but it was a great learning experience. The most important and bitter lesson was to back up your work. I lost all the files due to those stupid Iomega Zip Disks and their wonderful Click of Death. So the pages here are scans of print outs.

Posted in comic-menu, Comics by Bob on Mar 7th | No Comments