Near Art Part One

Whew, the first part of my comic novella is out the door! What a long process it's been. A lot of tweaking, fine tuning, editing, course changing and grumbling from me as I had to be smart and give up on some inside jokes and plot elements that would only make any kind of sense to me. What remains is a better story with a clear plot that gets up and running in no time at all! Twelve pages is not that much to tell a long form story and to keep interest over a month between each is a lot to ask. I've done short comic stories ranging from 5 to 11 pages, and read at once it's a good read.
Page count and time aside my goal from the start was to do something different, hence a pop love story, confection, eye candy.

Of course I can never leave thing alone so I had to keep dumping in a lot of stuff and the whole thing took on a love story ala Philip K. Dick tone. Which would be nice if, again, I had the space and pages to set things up. We, the editor and I, had hoped to do a strip within a strip, a twist on reality, a mobius strip. See, it even takes a while to set up a bad pun about it!

I started by coming up with my (half baked) idea, then doing thumbnails. Visually driven, I wound up falling in love (no, no pun intended) with some ideas.
Bad cartoonist, no credit line!

Since this is the launch, I don't want to spoil it by giving too much away. The magazine described it as semi-autobiographical. I like to think of what the writer Denny Eichorn once told me. I had been illustration a few of his auto-bio comic stories and I asked him if they were true, he replied, "Well, they're true enough."