Wait... I... I've been here before...
About a year or two ago, I was still in school trying to understand art and see if I enjoyed graphic design, when my writer pal Scott and I started trying to put life into a brief idea we had early on in college. I think I was reading Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and thought a masked vigilante on our college campus would be so exciting. Or at least, the idea of a masked vigilante on our college campus would be so exciting. I drew a first, very poor sketch of a figure in a fencing costume, called it "The Fencer" and kept it in a notebook forever.
Kudos (or a tasty treat) to Scott for giving it the breath of life a year later, when he wrote a pilot storyline for our new hero. He gave the character a set of friends, a motivation, an origin. All the great ingredients for a good story (which Scott knows all too well how to write).
So I got very excited and promised all these wonderful things to my friend Scott, about how we would have amazing characters and amazing stories and hundreds of issues to rival even Spider-man and the other Marvel legends. But then I realized... I hated how I drew, it would take forever just to do one issue, I had no idea which supplies I needed, and school was getting a bit tougher. And we both never talked about The Fencer again...
...until a few months ago, when I started picking back up on Ex Machina, a great comic book that, not only has an amazing story, but has art I could only dream of doing. I've graduated college, I'm working, and now I have no homework, and tons of free nights. So Scott and I started talking about our long lost idea again, and I started sketching out some improved renditions of our characters. I ended up finding a voice and style in illustration that I'm not always happy with, but is slowly starting to feel like my own.
I'm halfway through Issue #1 of The Fencer, and couldn't be more happy with the work. Scott's stories are pitch perfect, and I'm trying to draw from every source of illustration inspiration I can find among other comic books.
We had a blog before, in our first attempt at this, but I figure it's time to make a new one, one that will actually follow the completion of something. I can't wait to show what we're doing. It's really exciting:)