Entry 49: Blast From The Past- Part 4

 Back in Entry 25 I posted about Rat Bastard. It was a short comic I drew in my Senior year of high school. This time I'm posting something I drew almost right after that.
 These pages are from a short 4 page WildC.A.T.S submission I did and they mark my first real attempt at drawing something to appeal to a publisher. Of course the publisher I wanted to appeal to was Jim Lee's company, Wildstorm. If you go back to Entry 8 you'll see why working in Jim's studio was my goal from the age of 13.
 The story for these 4 pages involved Grifter and Voodoo undercover in a restaurant where a Yakuza deal is going down, but of course they're not just Yakuza they're Daemonites. It wasn't a very complex story or a very good story, but it didn't need to be.
 I sent this to Wildstorm along with a copy of Rat Bastard but I don't recall ever hearing anything back. I honestly think I got the address wrong. But less than a year later I got a chance to show it directly to the editors at Wildstorm when I went to my first comic book convention.

In 1997 when I was 18 I moved with my dad from Alaska to Orange County CA. After the move I started drawing a short story that took place in Anchorage. I wanted the story to be in real places that I knew so I used photos I had taken for reference. I ended up  kind of making Anchorage look a lot more interesting than it is. I guess living there I liked to imagine it being a lot more interesting than it was and I think that came threw in my depiction of it. Thees scenes were inspired by Tardi's Manhattan story that was printed in Raw magazine. I didn't own the book, I had only seen it because my buddy DJ had it, but it made an impression on me.

 Now that I was living in Orange County I was only 2 hours away from the San Diego Comic Con. So in 1997 I went for the first time to a Comic Convention. I really just wanted to show my work to someone but really didn't know how it worked. I went just for one day and had time to only do one portfolio review. So it was this short WildC.A.T.S story and these few Anchorage story pages that I showed to Wildstorm editors Scott Dunbier and John Layman. I got a really good response from them and John Layman gave me his card. It seemed really encouraging. How naive I was...

(edit: the story set in Anchorage has now been published in PAKLIS #0)