Electric Team

Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving! I celebrated the holiday yesterday by eating entirely too much food, as is traditional.

This time of year you’re also supposed to think about the stuff you’re thankful for.  I’m thankful for my loving family, great friends, steady employment, blah blah blah, all the regular stuff, I’m a very lucky man, but this year I am particularly thankful that I am living out my dream of writing an ongoing comic series. This is a dream I’ve had for 25 years that has never wavered or faltered, something I always wanted to do and kept putting off making it happen, but now I am doing it. True, part of the original dream was that I would be paid for writing an ongoing comic series, instead of putting it out on the internet for people to read for free, but those are just details.

The point is that I can routinely check my email and see brand-new artwork from Samantha Albert, who has brought my scripted pages to glorious life. This is a great feeling.

These last two pages have been particularly difficult, too, and she completely rose to the challenge. Especially page 43. Did you see page 43? Seriously, you need to see page 43, because it is a page where Sam upped her game to the next level.  The top two-thirds of the page is a representation of Zarko’s shattered mind. In the script I asked Sam to find her inner Bill Sienkiewicz. I didn’t mean that she should try to draw in his style, but that she should try to find the freedom to just do-what-the-hell-ever that makes Sienkiewicz’s work so great, and use whatever media she had available, and be as abstract expressionistic as she wanted. And I told her to mess with the lettering and make it all weird. Basically, I gave infuriatingly vague instructions, and she did something beautiful.

After that is page 44. In the script I wrote something to the effect of, “Show Zarko reassembling himself. I’m not really sure what this should look like.” Fortunately Sam figured it out, and made it look easy:

Ah, comics!