From the Archives: The Last Bulldog
Dateline: Titan Comics, 2006. Despite a few years of reduced activity, I had decided to participate in the annual "24 Hour Comic Book" day, in which a creator attempts to create a 24-page comic book in a single continuous 24-hour period. Rebecca and Paul at Titan had organized the event and were hosting as many comic creators as the premises would hold, and I thought maybe the event was just what I needed to get my creative juices going again.
It didn't quite work out that way. After about 12 hours, dead-tired and unhappy with the 9 scratchy pages I'd produced, I basically gave up and just hung out, reading Y: The Last Man trades, and yakking with the other comic creators. James O'Barr told us the true story of the death of Brandon Lee, while up in the front of the store, Paul Milligan was working feverishly on the first of his awesome Rock God 24HCs. Overall it was a good time, and I'm glad I went. But creatively, it wasn't the jump-start I was looking for.
I don't think I've ever posted these pages before, but here they are. This was the first sequential work I'd undertaken since the four-page story "Welcome to My World," which appeared in the Even More Fund Comics charity anthology in 2004, and it was only the second time I was working with my new design model for Bulldog Malone. Basically I had tried to reinvent him as slighly younger, thinner, with a more expressive mouth. In doing my regular Complex City book, I was always fighting those droopy jowls of his -- they made him seem more dog-like, but made it almost impossible to get any kind of expression onto his face. So I revamped him with a somewhat more cartoonish -- but infinitely more versatile -- gob. Hopefully, nobody even noticed the difference. This is the last Bulldog Malone story in comic book form I ever worked on.
So anyway, here's what there is of "Hellsgothirak in the Under Dimensions" (a title, yes, inspired by Henry Selick's Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions). The really embarassing thing? Four years down the road, I have no idea where this story was going. I know I had the whole thing loosely plotted out in my head, but I've completely forgotten whatever the payoff was supposed to be. Oh well.
Click on image to see all 9 pages.
