Max 2

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The early Miracle Max was sort of an adopted uncle to a pair of kids. The girl here is the daughter of the two of the scientists of his team of adventurers. The boy is her cousin.

This is another example of inking with Micron pens. I love the things. I was so happy when a friend introduced me to them. For years I used refillable technical pens when I wanted clean consistent lines. The technical pens were fairly expensive and required a lot of care and maintenance. These days I do most of my inking with a brush but I still use Microns for straight lines and when I want to do detail work.

Max 1

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I’m fascinated by primates – lemurs, monkeys, apes and, especially, hominids – the offshoots of the human evolutionary line that probably have gone extinct. I say probably because human beings have been seeing mysterious hairy manlike creatures on every continent except Antarctica up until the present day. There’s the Yeti and the Yeren in Asia, Bigfoot in North America, the Yowie in Australia and a variety of creatures in Africa and South America.

Miracle Max was originally conceived of as a sort of simian, more family friendly Doc Savage. He had team of scientists and adventurers that he worked with. Sometimes he fought international criminals. Sometimes he tracked down mysterious creatures – lake monsters, sea serpents, skyfish and other things.

This illustration was done to both play around in that version of Max’s universe and to practice inking with Micron pens. I put as many examples of primates, both real and anomalous, in the illustration as I could fit. The featured humans are members of Max’s team.

Cauldron 1

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In 2003 (or maybe 2002) I decided to try to turn The Cauldron into a webcomic. The world of the story had changed a bit from the basic premise. No longer did it take place in what was basically a 20th century America with elves, vampires and other magical folks. Now the stories occurred in a world with a multitude of differently evolved intelligent primates. Half those primates evolved from lemurs. Half from apes. The stories still revolved around cops who had to solve magic related crimes.

Cauldron 1

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In 2003 (or maybe 2002) I decided to try to turn The Cauldron into a webcomic. The world of the story had changed a bit from the basic premise. No longer did it take place in what was basically a 20th century America with elves, vampires and other magical folks. Now the stories occurred in a world with a multitude of differently evolved intelligent primates. Half those primates evolved from lemurs. Half from apes. The stories still revolved around cops who had to solve magic related crimes.

Oblivion Seas 3

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A final three character portraits from my Oblivion Seas story outline.

The gent on the left is one of the sailors. The young man in the middle is the slave of the merchant featured yesterday. The fellow with the ruined face on the right is someone that our protagonists meet on their way into the sea of weed.

Oblivion Seas 2

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Continuing from yesterday – more Oblivion Seas character portraits.

On the left is the First Mate, if my memory serves me correctly, the narrator of the original novel. In the center is a merchant, one of the Glenn Carig’s passengers. On the right is the merchant’s secretary. Both the merchant and the secretary are my additions to the story.

Oblivion Seas 1

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Today’s, tomorrow’s and the day after tomorrow’s character portraits are all from 2000 or 2001. I was playing around with taking the Sargasso cartoon series idea and turning it into a comic of some sort. Sargasso was inspired by William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”. “Inspired by” meaning that I took the general premise of the novel (shipwreck survivors encountering trapped ships and weird monsters in a sea of weed) and headed in a different direction.

Not too different a direction really. I thought the general premise was great but I wanted more weird creatures and more identifiable human characters. Most of the sailors in the story are nameless and even those with names don’t have much in the way of personality.

These portraits were done help me think of characters to populate the story with. I often find it easier to come up with character names and personalities after I’ve come up with character appearances. I don’t think I got as far as naming any of these gentlemen. The big guy on the left would be one of the regular sailors, the bearded fellow would probably be the bosun, and the young chap would be a cabin boy.