Firsts

I've been digging through the archives and thought I would share this. This is the first piece of comic book art I ever had published. This was in 1986, or early 1987. This was the inside back cover of Thundermace #3. The image in the center of the page is mine (well, mine and Fred's). This one of the very rare occasions of my pencils being inked by Fred instead of the other way around, although if memory serves the big skull in the background was really lightly sketched in, so a lot if not most of the detail there is Fred's.

It's a drawing of Chakan The Forever Man, one of the characters Created and published by Robert A. Kraus of RAK Graphics.

Time for a little background...

Rob is the hardest working man in comics and has been since the Black and White comics explosion of the mid 1980's. I'm pretty sure he has been at every convention I have gone to since that time (and every one you've ever gone to as well). His book Thundermace was, for a brief time, one of the highly-sought-after books in the black and white market. Chakan originally appeared as a backup feature before going on to star in his own book and to become the star of a Sega Genesis video game.

We met Rob at Mid Ohio Con in 1985 or 86 (several of the Mid Ohio Cons blend together in my memory). At the time Fred and I were neck deep in the comics business, working hard to get our own book published (that's another story I'll recount here some day). Rob was one of the nicest guys in the small press comics world and was incredibly supportive. He asked us to do an illustration of Chakan and next thing we knew we were published. If you look closely at the other drawing on the page you can see that we're in good company. There's a piece by Vince Locke, original artist of the Deadworld comic, and another by Guy Davis who drew many issues of Sandman Mystery Theatre and the Hellboy spinoff series B.P.R.D. (among many, many others). Rob is still out there, working convention after convention. If you see him say hi for me.

Check out RAK Graphics.