You can click on the image above to download a PDF of the pages. You’ll enjoy it more if you read the blog post first.

Even if you’re a very serious comic book artist – Okay, scratch that. If you’re me, there’s still a part of you that is a snickering, puerile schoolboy.

I came up with the idea for Atomic Fruit while still attending ACA, which is across 10th Street NW from North Hill Mall in Calgary. North Hill looks better these days, but back in the mid 80s it was very run down. The Safeway was pretty decrepit. In winter the whole complex looked like a bleak post-apocalyptic gulag.

Daydreaming one day I thought about grapes running around riding bananas. I was probably channeling the California raisins.

I worked with Derek Mah on it. I wrote the story, giving him thumbnails and a model sheet, and he returned full art and letters. It marked the only time someone else drew something I wrote, and Derek turned in a great job.

The other pieces owed a lot to reading too many Mad and Cracked magazines.

Response to the issue was mixed. Either you liked humour, tasteless or otherwise, or you didn’t. Most wanted me to deliver on the promise shown with Three and metrOwerks in the first two issues of the Gazette.

I was inclined to agree with them. If you’ve already read the post on Three and The Global Gazette #1, you know that Three #1 followed this issue after some months.

The Gazettes were my most vibrant period of comic work and I remain deeply proud of them. I proved that I could handle different types of material and not just churn out the same story over and over again. I brought them to market, such as it was, and extended my reach, making many new connections. I helped others through the Big Mini-Comics List find new readers and fellow creators. Many readers and creators wrote to me saying they had never seen small press books of that quality before and wondered why I wasn’t working professionally. Sorry it’s taken so long to answer the question, but these posts have shed some light on that.

My next comics would be Three #0 – a reprinting of the story from The Global Gazette #1 – and the all-new Three #1. That material was covered in the previous Three post.

One final bit before we move on to the other work done in the late Nineties. While working on the last Three comic – the one that amalgamated the two existing stories – I created a new anthology comic called Drawing Board and put out two issues. It collected many of the pin ups, proposals and other pieces that you have seen in these posts. There was nothing new. As such, there’s no reason to show them here again.

Up next : Captain America and Other Pieces : 1996–2000

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