my trial by fire

Saint Sinner
© Clive Barker &
Marvel Comics inc

Writer: Elaine Lee
Art by: Max Douglas
Editor: Marc McLaurin

Ok, this is the 5 page prologue for Saint Sinner, published in Hokem & Hex #1 and in the Barkervers/Razorline sampler.

I would say that during the time I worked on this and the first issue - even the second issue for the most part - I was drawing in some of my hippest moods. After all I had landed my very own monthly book! I thought at the time that it was the absolute perfect project for me, having been led to believe that I'd be able to do what I wanted with it within reason art/visual storytelling wise.

I was assured that "we trust you" a number of times in what I would latter come to recognise as the condescendingly/passively dismissive tone of a number of editors I ended up working with at Marvel. When I hear it now the modified hairs of my inner ear translate it into "yah yah, were going to totally ignore you kid".

With that [soon to be short lived] sense of confidence I was really happy about the gig. Add to that, the conversations I was having with Elaine at this point about future story lines were getting me really hyped about the gig.

The genre was something I was definitely into. A sort of gothic horror thing with time travel part of the plans so the possibility of all sorts of different realties, dimensions and time periods to play with. The visual possibilities were very exciting. In this short story alone I spent a lot of time digging into old books of medieval illumination as research for the document the artist/monk is forging in the story. That led to allsorts of interesting reading and discovery.

Also it was on this short prologue that I developed the computer/photoshoped effect for Kento Kanto - he's the dude with he Mohawk.

He's a dimensional shifter who's almost never really fully in any one plane of existence. So for his character I developed a method of scanning in drawing of him and using Photoshop to induce a motion blur, then print him out with a laser printer on sheets of transparent adhesive material and sticking him onto the pages with that like zipatone [which I had begun making my own of as well] .

This also allowed me to draw portions of the BG behind him to farther enhance the look of transparency. I was pretty happy about coming up with this. Remember, this is in late 92'/early 93' and I was working on an old LC with the first version of Photoshop, no one had done any really computer graphics in comics.

Hell, desktop publishing was still a novelty!

Marvel for their part only used computers for email and writing at their office and had just invested in scanners & a Power Mac to generate films in-house.