For this Illustration Friday topic, these old comic pages sprang to mind, so I went thumbing through my old yellowing bromides to find them. This picture goes way back to the second (unpublished) issue of Maelstrom, and was drawn around 1983. Another pic from the same page appeared in a newspaper interview I did at the time.

Once I'd decided I wanted the climax of this story to be in the rain, I really enjoyed experimenting with the approach in pure black and white. Mostly, I used a lot of black and white waterproof inks, but also cut strips of dotty screentone.

The sequence lasted about 7 pages and gets pretty nasty in places, in spite of the pretty artwork. It's also too short in some ways. So, while I think some of these pages are among my best comic artwork ever, I'm not convinced the script is good enough to publish now. There are a few hundred pages of Maelstrom, but only the first issue and serial in Reverie saw print. As the first issue ended on a cliffhanger, there were a few people annoyed that they couldn't find out what happened, but this frame gives a clue at least :).

Rain is a b&w comic artists dream to work with. I may have to do it again sometime.

Labels: Illustration Friday, Maelstrom