Well, it's been very slow going, and I know I've shared some of these first pages with you in the Gerry, but I'm happy to present a preview of the comic book that Cyborg Caveman and I have been working on. I'll probably color it, but for now, I'm just going to use some grey tones to improve readability.

Please let us know what you think!

This shall be the finest comic book of the 2020s.

Amazing work. I like the chick page.

Thanks for the very kind words!

Very, very nice!!

Good work!

Great work, Hanzo!

Top notch.

Very, very nice.

This looks great!

Does an admirable job of catching the period feel it aims for. You really know your business!

Awesome that you've completed eleven pages already!

How many pages is the entire issue planned out to be?

Actually, I just spoke to Greg yesterday and I realized I had tons of Lygor pages from a project we never completed there -- so we're going to combine the two and do a Tales of Suspense thing (back when it featured a separate Captain America and Iron Man story). So one or two more pages of Doc Dino and then 16 pages of Lygor.

Thanks for asking!

And thanks everyone for the extremely kind words!

Very very cool. Nice job!

Still plugging along on this, getting pages done. I think I should be done in about two months if I can swing it.

I have two totally empty pages to do and then five pages of tight roughs / pencils to digitally ink. And then coloring... I would prefer not to, but I really think the superhero / fantasy genre needs color and while I don't expect to make any money from this, I would like people to actually read it, and I know the color helps.

But man, I've been working on this for over a year -- a year to do a single comic! -- and it's easily the fastest I've ever worked and the deepest I've ever gone on a project. I'm 43 with kids and a mortgage, so my window for a life of poverty and overwork as an indie comics creator is gone, but it will be a deeply satisfying moment when this thing is finally complete.

Huge thanks to Ian Evans for saying this in April. The pages have come easier and faster lately, and while that's due to a variety of factors, I think knowing that all the minutiae I worry about when drawing probably isn't being noticed by 99% of people has been very freeing. Just get it done, listen to your instincts, and let the art be the art.




Anyway, here's one more random page to scope out.

Oh yeah, I'm not doing this. I realized I didn't have as many Lygor pages in the bank as I remembered and it would be easier to just complete 22 pages of Doc and make it a two-issue thing.

Great to see the progress James! Sign me up at SuperNova level when you crowdsource/gofundMe the publishing!

This is excellent.

Freakin' brilliant. If you'd put comics like this out regularly, you'd be one of my favorite modern comics artists with work like that.

i also just realized I never really explained what this is about, though I imagine a lot of it is self-explanatory from the pages posted already.

It feels like just about every new superhero series has some sort of high-concept since the old Marvel days -- superheroes with regular problems, superheroes if they were more like real people from history, deconstructing the genre's tropes, superheroes on a reality show, etc. And it's great, it's what's kept the genre going for decades on end. But as you might remember, I've been on a Golden Age comics strip / book kick, just enjoying how straightforward and earnest the approach to adventure comics used to be.

And I thought it would be cool if there was still a comic like that today -- though I imagine there undoubtedly are, I just don't know where to get them -- so I started thinking about what my "ultimate" golden age adventure yarn would be. I once heard KILL BILL described as the ultimate Kung Fu movie mix tape -- I wanted to do something similar by mixing my favorite elements of pulps, comic strips, comic books, and pulp-inspired adventure films like King Kong and Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad and Greek Mythology movies.

While there is no shortage of great pulp-inspired comics -- Tom Strong, The Rocketeer, Xenozoic, Lobster Johnson, The Black Beetle, The Goon, Matt Wagner's Batman stories, etc. -- they combined all the elements those creators loved most, not the ones I loved most (though Tom Strong comes very close). The lost worlds and civilizations of Burroughs and Merritt, the eldritch mysticism and horror of Howard and Lovecraft, mysterious costumed heroes like The Phantom, Batman and Superman, and, of course, as much Jack Kirby as I could muster.

For that to exist, I'd need to get to work. And get some help. I had a collection of tropes, a handful of story moments I'd like to draw, and a vague outline -- but not a story or characters. This is the part where I always stall out, never satisfied with any of the ideas I come up with myself. Enter Cyborg Caveman. The guy is so talented and has such a big imagination that it seems like he can always take whatever random hodgepodge of ideas I have and turn them into a coherent story, complete with his own unique ideas and sensibilities drawn from his encyclopedic knowledge of adventure paperbacks. Once I brought him on board, he did most of the heavy lifting from a story and character perspective, leaving me to focus on the art and toss in an idea or two whenever I'd get one.

Anyway, that's what we're trying to do.