In Stores Now!
No, not (The Artist Formerly Known As) The Painted Man. That sucker, while about to be sent to the publisher in its final form, will not grace bookshelves until somewhere in the vicinity of March 2009.
No, I’m talking about issue #1 of Division 18, the Union of Novelty Costume Performers (www.division18.com), in stores now!
Co-created by yours truly, Division 18 is the result of an ejaculation of raw creativity (and blatant disregard for company time) onto that most fertile of all mediums, the blank page.
Rewind 6 years or so. I am working in medical publishing, and more or less hating every minute of it. To help maintain my sanity, I use my powers of persuasion to get my bosses to hire my two best friends, Jeremy Donelson (who I have been making comics with since 7th grade) and Matt Bergin (who I worked with when I managed a comic store briefly after graduating college).
It all started when I, as Production Manager, decided to change the paper stocks on some of our medical publications. I asked the printer to send me some samples of different stocks with different bindings so I could get a look and feel before making a decision. He complied, and sent over several blank books for me to choose from.
The decision was quickly made, but those blank books kept calling to me, begging to be filled with SOMEthing, ANYthing. As a creative type, there is nothing I hate more than a blank page. What use is paper, unless you put something on it? Was it right for me to deny those books the very thing they existed for?
Of course not.
So I mentioned to Matt that it would be fun to play a game that Jeremy and I used to play in High School (during class). We would take turns drawing panels in the book. The panels could be whatever we wanted, so long as we followed the rules:
- The panel could not contradict something that happened in a panel before it.
- The panel had to in some way continue the story formed by the panels before it.
- We weren’t allowed to talk about the content, or what we hoped to have happen in the book.
Jeremy immediately signed on as well, and we began to fill those books, one by one. It took a little while to get a rhythm going, but eventually, a large cast of repeating characters grew out of our fecund imaginations, taking on lives of their own. We didn’t set out for it to happen, we were just trying to make each other laugh.
And we did. Oh, boy, did we laugh. And draw. And pass the book around to co-workers. All on company time.
It a wonder we didn’t all get fired.
Jeremy was clearly about a thousand times better an artist than Matt or I, and decided he wanted to take a whirl at making a “real” comic out of our little jam session, and Matt quickly signed on to write. Since I was working hard on The Painted Man at the time, I bowed out, but gave them my blessing, encouragement, and when solicited, opinions on the resulting books. They got picked up by indie publisher Silent Devil almost instantly, and the legend began.
As a comic lover all my life, it is immensely fulfiulling to see a book on the shelves with my name on it (even if only as a co-creator), and containing characters whose development I touched in some ways. I’m sure that feeling is multiplied a hundred-fold for Matt and Jeremy, who have been workign tirelessly for months to bring it to life. I think Jeremy literally chained himself to the drawing table.
So go out there and buy a copy. Shit, buy ten. I’ll get ’em signed for you.
Can’t wait to see the graphic novel version of The Warded Road.