How does time fly?

It seems like both an eternity and just yesterday that we started. Original crew of King Tractor Press was me, D.F. Cole, Orlando Baez, Kenneth Landgraf, and Geoff Grace. D.F. and Geoff were on Innocent and Orlando and Kenneth on Family Bones. I was on both. That was our team.



Here are two of D.F.'s original designs.


Geoff left pretty quickly for bigger and better things. Not sure what, but I know he's out there. And I discovered, by chance, Dawid Strauss and Sarah Ruffino. Dawid is out of South Africa and Sarah was at the time in California. There was something amazing that I saw in them. They quickly finished page #1 (shown on the right) from Gene Gardens, a new mini-series I had written. It blew me away. I think it goes beyond "comic book" and begins to breathe as art. It was just wonderful and exactly the direction I was looking for.

When I got the idea of doing comic books I felt that I didn't want to do another Superman or Spider-Man, I want to do something different. If you walk into a comic shop you'll find that 80% of the books all look like each other. Similar stories, art, and especially characters. Coming from a TV/Film background, I know that many kinds of stories work on television. Why are comics stuck in Super-Hero or Spy mode? What about sports, true-story, political, or love stories? Where are those comics? The Japanese realized the interest in a wide variety of genres with their hugely popular manga and anime. I believe that the rest of the world is no different.

Dawid and Sarah proved my theory. The response was amazing. I got emails and calls all asking who was doing this incredible art. And it was great. We had page 1, 2, and 4 done. Everything was going great.
(page 2 is to the left and page 4 is to the right)
I was sure by the end of the summer we'd have the first issue out and we'd change the world. I was wrong.









I got one more page, a cover (pictured below) and we stalled. Or I stalled us. It seemed like a good decision at the time, but looking back I realize that it's the main reason the book isn't out.
I'll start with that story tomorrow.