You can click on the image above to download a PDF of the pencils for issue #1. You’ll enjoy it more if you read the blog post first. Scans from photocopies.

“There’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m in here or because you think I should. I look back on the way I was then… a young, stupid kid who committed that terrible crime. I want to talk to him. I wanna try to talk some sense to him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s long gone, this old man is all that’s left. I gotta live with that.”

– Red from The Shawshank Redemption, 1994

Nightmark was where I started to grow up. Just a little, and it was pretty painful at the time. In these posts on my comic work, I’ve been focussing pretty much on the work, and only speaking of personal things as they related to the work itself. Without being too much on the counselling couch, I need to talk about what happened in my life around Nightmark to give the context. Five years of experiences since school were about to come together in one final act.

I should begin with the idea that my working in comics was not about being the responsible, objective professional. I was too young in my mind and experiences for that. No, for me it was – to paraphrase Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather – strictly personal.

Having seen enough aspiring artists make the same mistakes I made, I have begun to forgive myself for the inadequacies of my youth. Like anyone, I had big dreams, but they were more about arriving as the new hot artist, to find the recognition I desperately craved and had seen little of in my life, not the dedication and work ethic that it actually requires. So while I had it in me to complete short term assignments which required only a couple of weeks of part-time work, when it came to Nightmark and its three-issue commitment, getting the contract was the reward, and I was slow to deliver upon the actual work that would be published.

Let me be clear. The pencils for issues 1 and 2, collected here as PDFs, are hands down the best pencilling I ever did. The first half dozen pages alone took three to four evenings apiece to do. If only I had had the luxury of that amount of time. Even though I didn’t have it, I took it. Commercial comics are about doing the best possible job in the timeframe you have. Allowing for a page a day, the pencils and lettering (what I was originally contracted to do) should have taken me about 90 days. Instead, it took me over a year to deliver what would be three issues of pencils and two of inks.

I was crazy about the subject matter and I had as much reference at hand as I could find in those last few years before the internet. Period clothes, vehicles, architecture, weapons, Celtic culture. I wanted this book to be something special. The project that would move me forward to the next level. With some solid pulp material and drawing skills that would for a moment go past my finishing skills, it could have done it. If I had just been a fucking professional about it.

But I wasn’t. I was impatient, immature without the focussed drive and true confidence in my abilities to be a person that people wanted on their team. The people around me paid for my neediness and insecurities. As my life deteriorated, Alpha became the unintentional recipient of it.

I had been able to get by in Calgary in the late 80s and early 90s. It was a cheap place to live thanks to the oil & gas industry’s response to the National Energy Program. Calgary was a small big city in a recession.

Cheap was good because as an art school dropout without much prospect to be a solid earner, I found myself working in one-hour photo labs for low wages. You’re young and idealistic, and of course you’re going to make it. So paying your dues and struggling was okay. You had nothing, and so had nothing to lose. And I’ll stop the clichés right there because it’s a romantic’s point of view, which was part of the problem.

My trouble was that I couldn’t see myself objectively. Feeling like a failure because of being asked to leave art school five years earlier was something that hung over me, and something I would not deal with for another 15+ years. And yet, I was smart. I knew I was smart. Smarter than other people to see things that were possible. Stuff they couldn’t see. Get the point? All the while being a scared kid who didn’t have the strength then to deal with the very real challenges of growing up. So I hid out in comics and dreamed of making it big.

The duality of it was that I was good at comics and was beginning to prove it. Without understanding that simple fact and building on that basic achievement, my insecurities and low self esteem made me hard to be around, or a target to be exploited.

My relationships with women (sorry, trust me, this is relevant), were as conflicted and screwed up as the rest of my life. Jokes about comics and bad shoes driving away women notwithstanding, I had the fun a 20-something has, however fitfully. And I vacillated between either the one-night stand or being clingier than velcro and super glue combined.

People talk about internet addiction, and it’s a real thing. Around the time of Nightmark, the first generation of home computers was in full swing. We didn’t have the internet, but we had electronic bulletin board systems (BBSs). You dialled in locally to a company that had a computer acting like a server, and you could chat and share files in real time with everyone else who had called in. I never thought I had an addictive personality, but that was the best drug I ever had. For someone who has never found his comfort spot in group activities, being in a group while not (and being accepted) was a very attractive situation to be in. Early on, this slowed down drawing even more.

There were regular get togethers at diners for users, and it was generally a pretty good thing to do. Some of us were social misfits, some of the others had lives that didn’t allow them to get out often. All of us appreciated and embraced the new technology.

There was one woman online I found myself drawn to. She was intellectual and did not look at the world through beige filters. Regardless of whatever else I was, I was that way as well. She was older than I was, and I was more than okay with that. I got on better with older women because I did not connect well with my peer group. Of course, it was lost on me that there was a little exploitation by what we now call cougars, but guys never seem to mind. All the power to you. I don’t regret it in the slightest.

If it had just been that few weeks of fun with her, things probably would have righted themselves and the books would have come out a good deal sooner. However, she and I were the intersection of the desperately needy, and that can be a very attractive thing when you share your emotional weaknesses that way. You can feel safe for a while, and that was important to me. I wanted to belong. For a while I did, and I was happy. It did not last and I was quickly overwhelmed by an unstable, dominant partner I had become financially dependent upon.

The recession was abating in Calgary, and prices were going up. The hourly wage of a photo lab worker was not keeping pace, and I was starting to get scared. I tried a couple of times to get work in an agency with the bits of design work I had done since leaving school, but this was years before comics were taken seriously in the world of commercial art. I remember one interview where one art director blew me off saying, “Pff, well, we know who to call if we ever need comic books,” and he and two other guys got up and left the room. Without any strength in my character to take away that I really needed to invest in my further education and keep going, experiences like that only drug me down and made me feel worthless.

That relationship came along, and seemed to offer the easy solution to all my problems. “I’m making good money. We’re in love. Why don’t you move in and you can do the comic?” Both times in my life that I did that, it was a huge fucking mistake. And this was only the first time. Stupid bloody kid that wouldn’t listen to anyone. Jesus, suck it up and deal with it. Don’t you realise you’re being manipulated? That it was about what they wanted and they did not have your best interests at heart?

A couple of months into it, I knew what I had done, but lacking the ability to stand up for myself, I knuckled under and made the best of it. Whatever I told myself at the time, it doesn’t matter now. I lived through it and got out a month or two after finding yet another photo lab job when Nightmark was done. I took the debt and left a big chunk of my innocence behind. It was devastating, but it was the only way I could learn then.

At the time I accepted Nightmark, it was to pencil and letter the three-issue mini series. It was the largest commitment I had made since The Eradicators, and I probably looked at it as “only pencils,” something that wasn’t as big as doing full art. Most, if not all, of the first issue was pencilled while still living on my own. After moving in with her, the second issue was underway.

In speaking with my editor at Alpha, I knew the search for an inker was underway. I looked forward to seeing the samples. When they arrived, I looked at them and was pretty underwhelmed. I gave my editor a call and said something like, “Is there someone else?”

“No, we’re gonna go with him.”

“What? He didn’t ink these pages did he? This was on vellum or over stats, right?”

“No, those are the pages.”

“These are over the pencils?”

Communication not being what it is today, I was not brought into the process to choose the inker, and Alpha went with who they did and I found out after the fact that it had been assigned. I don’t know where the final decision rested at Alpha, so I’m not trying to single anyone out personally with the outcome, but the inker was most likely given direction to change certain aspects of the art.

For one example, Kristin’s faces – especially with the hyper stylized eyes and lips – were a crushing and demotivating thing to experience from my perspective. All those hours, wasted.

In many ways, it was probably about control of the creative product. Being late with my work, and removed from the editorial process by thousands of miles, meant that my voice was not heard. Today, many years later, I’ve learned through some pretty bad situations that in order to get people to buy in you have to include them. Alpha did not. I felt powerless, and from there I knew I had made my bed. I had to complete the contract – so Alpha got the work – but with ever-decreasing returns. I can see the spot in the pencils in issue #2 where it happened, and the third issue saw my work regress. The negativity I had created in my professional and personal relationships was pulling me down very effectively and very quickly.

Click on the image above to download a PDF of the pencils for issue #2. Scans from photocopies.

During that call, I got pretty angry and said that I would ink issues 2 and 3. Now I really was in it over my head. More detailed art, at least doubling my remaining time on the project, in a relationship that would overwhelm me. Alpha would get back to me, acceding to my request/demand to ink the remaining issues, but they sure as Hell weren’t happy about it. In my mind, they had in part created their own problem.

Click on the image above to download a PDF of issue #3. Scans from the comic.

Things became pretty distant and functional with Alpha after the blowout over the inker. I knew there would be no more work with them after the assignment was completed. Even though I had made them wait all those months, they still kept the book on the schedule to be printed and released when it was done, and they paid me as well. So they were pretty honourable about it overall.

However, I never received my art back for issue #3, which was a part of the contract. A call to them sometime after yielded that they still had the art and that they’d return it, but they never did. I’ve included small versions of the pages in the PDF to let people know that if they’ve got the art it’s my property and I’d still like it back. Even if the pages suck.

The issues were cover dated April, May and June 1994, with covers by Bob Cram Jr.

Up next : The aftermath and in-between time.

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