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Hot off the presses, Hero Business Collection 2 is now available at our online store.
($5.00 each) Imagine your office, bitten by a radioactive spider. That’s the Hero Business, a comic chronicling the day-to-day adventures of an agency that caters exclusively to super-heroes (and their super-egos). This issue collects the second storyline, “The All-New, All-Different Bravado,” along with six “Coffee Break” gags and an exclusive-to-print “rough draft” character page. 28 office-packed pages in all! Place Order Here.
And a special shout-out to my buddy, Frank Pittarese, whose ace editorial skills have helped tremendously in both Hero Business collections.
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For this week’s “Rough Monday”, Im sharing some commissions from this past weekend’s Albany Comic-Con (great local show, btw). These are taken with my iPhone:
The request was for any Avenger. I was tempted to pick someone really obscure, like Mantis. But then I noticed he had no Firestars. And that’s just wrong. Ms Lion included gratis.
The request was for Colossus, but I threw in a Kitty Pryde freebie.
Lots of X-23 love. I sold an original pre-con drawing, and then got another request for X-23 in a Catholic School Girl outfit. I then imagined X-23 attending school and drew the logical conclusion of where she’s get scratch for eats…
The request was for Blue Devil. I always liked his original Hollywood-era incarnation… so this is an homage to that.
The request was for Black Widow… I hope I made her sexy enough, da?
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In this week’s “Rough Monday”, I thought I’d give you a peek into the creative process.
For last week’s “Powered Lunch” Coffee Break, I originally had a different punchline. I wanted to take the typical idea of the “rancid shared company fridge” and give it a Hero Business twist. The spin was that the leftovers could actually come to life, mixed with whatever strange stuff lurked in the super-powered refrigerator.
My process is to 1. script, 2. layout dialogue, 3. pencil and 4. ink/color…. knowing that things can evolve as we go. So here’s the original pass:
So, OK, this didn’t quite sit with me. First, I didn’t like Morgan’s pose. She didn’t seem disturbed enough by the sentient jello. She should either be freaked out or completely non-plussed (like, this sort of thing happens all the time in their world). So I went with disturbed:
OK, that’s better.
But I still wasn’t crazy about the joke. Seemed a bit “on the nose.” I wanted to punch it up. I decided jello was too mundane, so I substituted the much more interesting leftover, “Kung Pao Tofu,” because it sounded like something that would be a gross company fridge leave-behind.
Still not funny enough.
And then it hit me… another level of funny is “leftovers going bad”… and what that could mean. Suddenly, the bad-boy Tofu hitting on Morgan came to mind. And Morgan’s body language was made to fit that joke – like some creep is hitting on her at a bar. The absurd and strange punchline that’s hopefully more unexpected for the reader. I was much happier with this approach.
And the final:
Complete with the Tofu doing one of those “centerfold” poses.
Lastly, I changed the name of the comic from the mundane “Chilly Reception” to more interesting play-on-words approach, “Powered Lunch.”
So yeah, a lot goes into these things every week to give loyal heroites the maximum of funny, just so’s ya know ; )
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The 90s. It was the age of Zima, Melrose Place, Hootie and the Blowfish, sideburns and… Stiletto?
Yeah, Stiletto. One part “working at the mall”, one part “too much spare time” and one part “unhealthy comic book addiction.” It started as a lark… I created a mini-comic of “Stiletto”, a hard-edged heroine with a sharp blade and killer heels. It was only supposed to be one issue. But all my co-workers liked it so much, that it became a thing:
A sixteen issue mega-epic thing. With it’s own spin-off mini-series (“The Savage She-Cat” if you must know).
The character took a life of her own, serving as a satire for comic books, but “sexy under-dressed 90s anti-heroines” in particular (think: Lady Death, Cry For Dawn, Jim Balent’s Catwoman, and the like).
I took the first few issues of these (very, very rough) mini-comics and created my own ashcan editions available at good ol’ S&S Comics. Here’s the very first issue:
Stiletto had five ashcans in total, but the series didn’t catch the attention of any major publishers. When I started the Hero Business, I knew somehow Stiletto would return…. it was just a matter of when. She made a cameo return in “The All-New All-Different” Bravado on page 10, which skewered female exploitation comics. And then, when I brainstormed last week’s strip, the subject matter practically demanded Stiletto’s return.
I had already been toying with a revamped look, so I sketched it out:
And voila! Welcome back, ‘letto! We missed ya!
So, heroites…. do you like Stiletto? Would you like to see more of her archived 90s adventures on “Rough Mondays”? Let me know!
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