My 2nd Kickstarter Campaign launches on February 6th!

Hello, fine people of the planet Earth. I hope all of you are doing well. I am on the cusp of launching my second Kickstarter campaign. It is a 200 page sketchbook of portraits I've done over the past few years. I've done them in brush and ink mostly, like I do my comic book work. Some of them are created digitally as well, which also matches my comic book work - it’s about a 70% - 30% mix favoring the traditional side of the house. You can find the Kickstarter sign- up page here.

Speaking of “here,” here are a few samples from the book:

Before a friend took me to a comic book specialty store in high school (and promptly blew my mind), I wanted to be an illustrator, and primarily focus on doing movie posters. I loved movie posters back then, knew some of the great poster artists by name already, and recognized their art on sight. Because of this interest, portraits were of great concern to me from the beginning. I remember being 14 and trying to draw Indiana Jones as well as Drew Struzan did. I didn't succeed, of course, but I was pretty happy with my results. I'd love to show it to you, but I have no idea where it is. It's been lost for many years now. I may have given it to a friend.

I still love doing portraits and still find them important to my work. Even in my comic book work, I usually “cast” my major characters, using actors, friends, or family, then do everything I can to keep those likenesses as accurate as I can while drawing that story.

So I draw them often as practice. I draw men and women, as you will see, but I often focus on women because they were once a weakness of mine and I was determined for that to not remain a weakness. In this new book there will be a few faces you might recognize, many you won't, and if you pledge at the right level, you might just end up having your own face in the book along with everyone else.

Thanks for reading. I hope to see you over on my kickstarter page in the following weeks. Cheers.

Allow me too tell you about my inspiration for Mia Raven, the heroine of Recovery Incorporated.

I want to tell you about the two primary influences that led to the creation of Mia Raven today: Catherine Banning and Nikita.

Who the hell are these two women, you ask? Well don’t worry, I’m going to tell you. If you’ve seen either of these two films, you’ll get a stroll down memory lane, but if you haven’t, that’s okay, you’ll still get some key insights into my character that, hopefully, will get you interested in her. There’s plenty to be interested in, if you ask me.

So let’s start with Catherine Banning. She’s from the movie The Thomas Crown Affair. I’ve never seen the original from 1968, starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway. I should, I know, but I love the 1999 version starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo so much that I’ve simply never felt the need.

Pierce Brosnan plays the title character and I guess he’s supposed to be the main character of interest, but to me Catherine Banning seems to be the actual central character. The entire story centers on her figuring out that Thomas Crown is the one who stole the painting, going after him, falling in love, then making arrangements to fly away with him to lalaland and live happily ever after. During the story she navigates not only her relationship with Thomas Crown, but also with Detective Michael McCann, played by Dennis Leary.

From the moment Catherine Banning shows up she is a force to be reckoned with. She is attractive, flirtatious, sharp-witted, and intelligent, which instantly has detective McCann and his partner, Detective Paretti, played by Frankie Faison, off their game. She shoots holes in their theories, notices things they don’t, and very quickly reads their characters, including the fact that detective McCann is recently divorced.

What really jumped out to me, however, was her job. She works for the insurance companies. Her job is to try and recover the stolen painting so the insurance company doesn’t have to write a check for a hundred million dollars to pay out on the policy covering the insured painting. That immediately got my attention. I’d never heard of such a job before.

I have, in the years since, read of other people with similar jobs. I read about a similar group in Wired Magazine, who helps companies salvage inventory from wrecks. They get 50% the value of the rescue, which can be tens of millions per job. Catherine Banning says she’s getting 5% the value of the painting, which at $100,000,000 would be five million dollars! Not bad at all! High risk - you have to recover the stolen item in order to get paid, but if you do, it’s high reward.

I was immediately taken with what she did for a living. I wanted to know more. A lot more. Detectives McCann and Paretti discover that she was a bounty hunter prior to getting into her current line of work, so she’s not afraid of getting down and dirty, apparently. Color me even more intrigued.

On top of all this, she flies in from London with her strange habits (here she’s drinking her grass juice way before it was a common thing everyone could get at Jamba Juice)...

She speaks multiple languages (which Mia does because not only is she from Portugal, but she goes back there and spends several of her teenaged years trotting around Europe), which Catherine uses here to interrogate a prisoner...

Always seems to be dressed is the most interesting of fashions...

Whether it’s zipping around town, showing up at a black tie event, or spying on a suspect while they’re playing on the weekend.

And she has the guts to go right up to her target and tell him he’s her target. Every single thing about this woman is fascinating, from the big picture down to the most minute detail. I wanted to create a character like that for a long, long time, and I finally got my shot. 

Mia started as a thief, became a detective (you’ll learn the basics of how), and eventually figured out that there was a better way of doing that job - a way that paid better and didn’t confine her to the limits of the law. So she starts her own company working for higher end clients and insurance companies, but I didn’t just want to make a carbon copy of Catherine Banning, I needed my character to be her own person. She needed her own story, her own background, and her own personality.

For that, we turn to the other character that really informed who Mia Raven is. Nikita, or La Femme Nikita, was released in 1990. Written and directed by Luc Besson, this was my introduction to his work. It was also my introduction to the strong female protagonist. She's not really the ideal character for that icon, but it was my introduction nonetheless, and it really cemented in my head a love for the concept. 

Nikita, a gang-banging druggie, goes from this:

To a woman who is given a second chance by her government. She is asked to learn. Learn everything.

So she does. She learns to use computers, firearms, her body - as both a weapon and a lure. She learns about grace and the allure of being a woman, and three years later it all culminates in this: a night out. She is a wholly different woman than the one who entered the program as a nineteen year old punk.

The only catch is that this night out is a test...

It is a test to prove whether or not she can survive as an agent for the French government. Can she think under pressure? React to the unexpected? Survive when the odds are against her? And that led to the sequence that really stuck in my head.

Seeing beauty juxtaposed against violence. And believing it. That was the key element. I’ve seen so many of these types of stories since then that I don’t buy into. You can hire an attractive actress to play a role, but if they’re not tough, if they can’t do a healthy amount of their own stunts, then I’m never going to buy it. I want to see the muscles, the work that goes into getting strong enough to do the things they’re showing us they’re doing. I want to see the grit and determination on their faces as they struggle to get the things done. Like Nikita shoving a garbage crate out of the way with her arms and back exposed so I can see her muscles working, so she can crawl out of it slowly, painfully and make her way out on to the cold Paris streets after barely escaping with her life. But that's not all. I want to see women with complex inner characters. They need to have hopes and desires beyond just what the plot drives them towards; they need to be human. They need to want things normal women want. I want this for all characters in a story, but especially the lead.

Mia isn’t a spy, but she comes from a bad past. She has a bad set of parents who caused her an untold amount of grief as a child. It caused her to get into a lot of trouble that she luckily escaped from. Those troubled times taught her to think for herself though. They taught her to look out for herself, to watch her back, to not be overly trusting, and to rely on no one but herself in life. She has taken the time, effort, and expense to teach herself how to do all the things she might need to do for any given job, and continues to refine and add to those skills all the time. You’ll get to see some of that in her stories.

Unfortunately it didn’t teach her anything about how relationships work. Or how to navigate friendships. Her only real friend in the entire world is her cousin Jacinta, because Jacinta went through much of the same hell that Mia went through. This is, I think, what makes Mia such an interesting character. She’s very successful at her chosen job, but barely functions as a human being most of the time, so how successful is she really? How happy can she actually be? Does money buy happiness? Does job success soothe the inner demons that haunt her? I’ll give you one guess...

So that’s Mia Raven. That’s where the inspiration for her came from. I’m very proud of her and what I have in store for her. She’s a very real person in my mind; a fascinating character study in what I hope will be a series of stories that prove to be exciting, unexpected, wistful, and ultimately satisfying for everyone.

You can read issue 01 of Recovery Incorporated by backing thr Kickstarter campaign, which launches on Thursday, January 21st.

I will have my first Kickstarter campaign running in January of 2021!

That’s right, everyone: I will be running my first ever Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of the first issue of my creator-owned comic RECOVERY INCORPORATED, which I finished way back in 2013! At the time I didn't think there would really be a market for the comic in the US, but in the years since then the independent comic book market has really taken off here and so has the Kickstarter platform, so I think the time is right. I've been hard at work on a fantasy series, but I think it’s time to get some work out there, get my feet wet, so I'm doing it with a great character and story that I'm super excited to get back to and finish her initial story arc. From there hopefully I can get two books going at once. I've got big plans, but they all start with the first step, which happens in January. I hope you'll take that journey with me. It'll be worth it, I promise.

This space will not remain stagnant for much longer!

So if you’re not aware, I have a newsletter. That’s where people keep up with what I’m up to. It’s where I share my thoughts and opinions on things, funny anecdotes, stories, and thoughts on popular culture, specifically on storytelling. My emails are starting to add up, however, and once I get to a year of sending out my newsletter I’m going to start sharing some of my older posts here as blog posts. You won’t get the comic strip that’s an exclusive part of the newsletter, although I might give you one or two as a teaser, but you’ll get some of the interesting subjects I’ve written about. A year after everyone one my newsletter has read it. So if you read stuff here and like it, and want to read stuff when it’s first presented, plus get the extras that are exclusive to the newsletter, you can sign up for it at any time right here on the website! So stay tuned! More posts coming soon!

Why the crickets?

Well, simply put, I'm still trying to make a living through drawing. I'm not the fastest artist around, so jobs tend to take up most all of my time. Most? Pft - all of my time. They take up every last second I've got left after being a father and a husband. 

I hope to either get to these eventually or, even better, pitch these ideas to publishers. I'm working on that now, actually, while I work my other paying comics gig. 

I know drawing for a living looks like nothing but fun and freedom, but it's hard work and time consuming. I work most weekends and late nights as well, although less as I get older because I need that sleep. I think about my own comics every day though and I'll get to them one way or the other, I swear. Here's a peek at what I'm currently working on, just so you know I'm telling you the truth. :-)

New Year, New Pages, New Story

We've added a couple of pages to Bimbo and started The Up Side of Down.

I've come up with many stories over the years. Most of them end up in the garbage, but every once in awhile a gem pops up and I keep it active in my brain. I write notes, develop it, and let it perculate. The Up Side of Down was the first of these. It started out an 8 page short for a contest run by Dark Horse Comics. It was well received but didn't win. Once the contest was over I realized the story had the potential for much more, so I began expanding it. It bloated into a 12 issue mini-series, then life happened and it sat. For years. 

Over the course of those years I developed a few more gems in my head and on the computer. I persued those in my head because I felt they'd be more "commercial," but The Up Side of Down kept poking the inside of my skull, demanding attention. Eventually I read over the notes for the expanded version and some of the stuff I had written made me laugh. It's rare for me to like anything I create after a couple of days, so the fact that I still enjoyed this story had an impact on me. So here we are.

I've gone back in and honed the story into a much tighter narrative, clarified some of the character arcs, and, well, generally improved upon it every which way, which got me motivated to start working on the art for it again. Although my ADD will eventually give me the itch to work on the other stories again, I'm going to try and stay focused on this one for as long as I can. If I work on the others it will be to finish the initial story setup for each (so I'll have the material I need to pitch them if necessary), which I'm okay with, but The Up Side of Down is still my heart's favorite - it's a very personal story for me and one that deserves to be told. It's actually about something. So here we go...

As always, if you find yourself enjoying what you read here for free, please consider supporting our efforts through Patreon, which you can find here. Thanks!

We have a home!

Took a while to figure everything out, but we finally have a home for all our comics. Most of our activity will be through our Patreon page, but this is the central hub for actually reading our stories. This will also be the place to keep up with any kind of announcements, etc...

Stay tuned...