A Page Leftover from a Story Idea
When you look at old artwork, you find that a novice’s ambitions (perhaps best left alone) coincide with the pleasant sensation of revisiting the novice’s stepping stones. You might recall when and where you did a certain drawing, raising strings of other memories that were somehow connected to this image. Sometimes the technique tells you something of what you were trying to do.
After exploring that clunky technique I had discovered by overloading my pen, I turned around and pursued the fine lines of a crowquill. This was the “style” that would stay with me for the next few years; though I had rejected the obligatory crosshatching of pen and ink just months before, here I was again brought in under its weave, and now with added facility.
Stuck on the thought of someday making it in comics, I was nurturing the idea that comics can be of all types and anything was possible. These notions were coming to me when all that could be reasonably expected from that era were superheroes done up in 64-color murk. Still, I insisted that someone could do something different, like rendering an entire comic in crowquill to be published in nothing but black and white. That was something I had never seen before, and I felt that there might be a place for something so groundbreaking. Looking back at this inchoate artwork, these revolutionary ideas with which I was filling my head may have had little to back them up. Naturally, I was blind to my own work. And even though I was aware of the limitations of the market, I wasn’t going to give up on these new ideas, these new inroads into comics that would be presented one day, even if not by me.
The story behind the page below is now gone to memory; it is not even a completed page. But I do remember some of the decisions made for this page, such as why I chose the angles and considerations around the bricks. On second thought, though I associate this page with a crowquill, a closer look at the marks tell me that it was likely done with a technical pen.