Why I started making comics.

Years ago I went to art school and made paintings. Lots of them. They were quirky, and weird, and had odd people or odd things doing odd stuff in odd scenes. I got better and better at them. I made it all the way to where a far out-of-the way State University paid me a small bit of money -plus free tuition- to be an Art Teacher and get a Masters Degree. I got a swelled head, and quickly found out my degree didn't really carve out the career I was hoping for.

In fact, not only was the degree letting me down the art was too. I mean, how cool, a winged torch flying through a room. But where does it go to? Or what else comes down the stairs?

What I was stuck with was an unalterable fact about painting:

Paintings don't move.

Well, duh. Of course they don't. Or rather- the things depicted within don't change. The moment of time that they are shown in is the moment they are locked into forever. We don't see the old man and his daughter in American Gothic walk into the farm house. We don't see Jesus and his disciples just sitting down to The Last Supper.

It was this choice, of having to make a choice about where in time my 'scene' is happening that I found frustrating.

Enter sequential imagery. Comic strips and comic books. I lost immediately the 'preciousness' of the ONE image and found new energy in thinking about a 'happening' in a 'scene' with 'characters.' Not one image told the whole story, each one helped the other in an assembly-line fashion until you the reader have reached a satisfying conclusion.

Take a look at two pages from Double Barrel 7, where Colt and Jackson get the better of a mad scientist. I was able to take a scene (the basement) and twist, turn and smash it around while the two captives overcome the scientist.:

Comics can't be precious.

The visuals aren't as influenced by the Artists' hand or personality (at least not as much). When I got my paintings critiqued in art class the discussion would inevitably come back to me as a person; my emotions, my passions, my desires. HELP! I'm too shy for that!!

Comics were a lot different. I'd hand someone a comic I made and they would dive headlong into the story depicted, talking more about the scenes and characters rather than me the creator. At last I could hang back behind the curtain, which is what you kind of expect a comic book creator to do. They gotta let the story matter more. I couldn't have been happier.

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