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December 26, 2007
TOO LATE Week Two! Plus Commentary!
Also! The first Wowio issue is now available! Download that suckah for free and I get paid!
After you've read this installment, come on back here and read the commentary!
I made my first full-length comic when I was twelve as a project for school. My second one was when I was thirteen and I did it over the summer. It was an anthology, but the character that I kept coming back to was Mystery Man. Here's the cover from that comic:
I had just read Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen for the first time before doing this, so he was definitely an answer to that sort of comic, to the best of my thirteen year old abilities. Pretty much an emo hyper-violent Batman analogue.
But I just friggin' loved this character. I kept coming back to him, building his world around him. I made spin-off books and crossovers and all of that great kind of stuff. I probably did around two hundred pages worth of material on this character over a three year period. He kept evolving as I grew as well.
Here he is hanging out at the Country Club Plaza from his second comic and in color from his third:
Then I've got him looming over the Plaza in an obvious Bruce Timm animated Batman homage and then from a 'Golden Age' adventure when he fought some vampires:
Then here he is in probably my best illustration of him from that time, followed by a cover for the last version of him I did, where he was sans costume and just a wandering bad-ass getting into trouble:
So, I'm sure you're asking what this trip down memory lane has to do with 'Too Late'? This book is my latest take on him, of course. Eddie Mann. Mister E. Mann. Mystery Man. Sure, it's one of those things that will probably only amuse me and half a dozen other people, but it's cool to me to see the culmination of nearly a decade and a half's work in this book.
This is actually the only scene in the book that I redrew, except for the first page from this scene. It was the first time I'd drawn some of the characters, and the first of the double-page spreads I'd done as well. A hundred pages of drawing later, and I felt that what I had just didn't hold up to the quality I felt I had in the rest of the book, so I went back, redesigned the office, laid out the shots differently, and did a better job of capturing the characters' likenesses. I'd show you the first version, but I'm kind of embarrassed by them. Sure, I'll show you stuff I drew as a kid, but I'm not going to show you what I did six months ago!
Posted by Schamberger at December 26, 2007 08:43 AM