Poison Ivy Collab

I asked the super talented Simon Gough (colorist of IDW's Snake Eyes, among other great works) to take a pass at coloring this Poison Ivy piece I did a ways back. He rocked the house!

Never Forget Where You Started

Taking a cue from Rob Guillory, I'm sharing some art I drew in my formative years. I say 'art' lightly here. As I've stated in interviews, I've been drawing all my life, with the ultimate aim to draw comics, and yet I floundered right around age 16 when I was in high school. I just got bored with it, and it took too long to do a page. BUT, I digress. Here's a look at some of the stuff I did way back when. First up is the only page I've found of my original character, 'British Devil.' I do not know why he was British or a Devil, for that matter. But, he was clearly an anti-hero/vigilante knockoff in the vein of early 90s comics, which is when I drew this at age 12. The butt shot in panel 4...all I can think of is Jim Carrey's line from Dumb & Dumber: 'He must work out.'

A few years later, at age 16, I did some Gen 13 sample pages. I do see some major improvement, but still tons wrong, and you can totally tell I'm riffing on J. Scott Campbell and Jim Lee, my two favorite artists at the time. It's funny to me though, that I can see my 'voice' start to show up in these pages, with the camera angles and attention to facial expressions. It's just sooo rough. As for the plot, I wrote it myself, I think. Couldn't tell you what the original plan was!

Well, that was cathartic. Any time I have a bad day drawing, I look back on these pages (or even pages I drew as far back as 2007) and it helps to see how far I've come. It's important to never forget where you started!