Electric Team

1. It’s been a long time since I did one of these. I used to do Ten Notes for every page, but when we had months pass between new pages, I kind of . . . forgot? So now I’m going to do notes on the first five pages of the montage sequence.

2. This montage has been in the works for such a long time . . . I was looking back through my Patreon posts, and I was sharing sneak previews of the artwork for these pages back in May. May! I think all of them were drawn by June, except for Josh’s, which was drawn last week. Josh is a busy guy.

3. I originally imagined The Electric Team as a monthly comic book series, because I love monthly comic book series. The premise–the Electric Team has to beat 1000 bad guys!–really lends itself to one-off, self-contained adventures, a new villain every issue. And that would have worked great if it were a monthly series. But once I realized the mathematical reality that we could only do four issues a year–at best!–I knew that we wouldn’t be doing a lot of one-shot adventures. We had to look at the big picture. So over the course of nine issues we got a lot of character background, and had some overarching storylines, but we barely made a dent in that list of 1000 bad guys.

For years now I’ve thought it would be fun to do a montage scene, showing some of the adventures that the team has had along the way. Lots of one-shot villains. One way I thought of it was, What would a summary of the first season of The Electric Team animated series look like?

4. I should probably talk about the actual pages, right? It made sense for Jeffrey to draw page 289, the first page of the montage, since he drew the preceding pages and it would make for a smooth transition. Similarly, I asked him to color and letter the whole thing to give the montage some visual coherence, even though the artists have different styles.

I’m glad we got the Ice Cream Mountains in here; back when Abi was little and we would play Electric Team, a mountain made of ice cream was one of her go-to settings.

5. Page 290 featuresIcthyon the Assassin and the bird lady because Sam Albert wanted to draw a killer fish man and a creepy bird lady, and Sam co-created the comic, so she gets to draw what she wants.

6. Destroyder, the villain on page 291, was created by my son Jackson. I liked the whole “Destroyder is actually the gun!” idea, I would have used that in an issue if we’d had time. Man, Joseph Morris did a great job designing Destroyder, it makes me want to actually use him in a story.

Jackson also created Sir Dirtbag, who appears on the same page. Dirtbag probably would have been a supporting character, if we’d had more issues, but I’m glad he at least got to make an appearance.

7. Page 292 features Dino Lord, another villain Jackson created. When I asked Lindsay Hornsby what she wanted to draw, she said dinosaurs, so she got Dino Lord. The Electric Team turning into animals was devised entirely because we knew Lindsay would make them look awesome.

8. Josh Burnett drew the story where Mr. Amazing fought a snake man, so I wanted him to illustrate this one-panel sequel on page 293, where the Electric Team fights a whole town of snake people. ZAM! Fantasmo looks cool, too.

9. The montage sequence is six pages long, so it wraps up next week. Then we return to the “Chrysanthemum” story, drawn by Jeffrey Johnson, which will go for two more pages. And then The Electric Team web comic is done! At least for now.

10. The Electric Team #10 will be out sometime in the near future, it will be an extra long issue, and it will be the last issue for the foreseeable future. It will collect the stories “Time Trouble!,” “Shellshocked,” “Ubermensch Unleashed!,” and “Chrysanthemum.” It will be lovely!