Next weekend I’ll be returning to DragonCon in Atlanta alongside Garth. While our partnership in comics ended four years ago and we currently offer vastly different comics in vastly different styles, I still love sharing a table with him. The main reason is that he’s one of my dearest friends in the world and I enjoy his company, but for the purposes of today’s blog I’m going to focus on why I love having our vastly different styles on one table.
The anchor of our table is STAR POWER, the sci-fi superhero adventure we worked on together for seven years. Despite it being concluded we still believe in it, we think it continues to hold up alongside our current works, and we’re proud to have our names on it. On either side of those books is Garth’s stuff and my stuff.
Garth’s work is supremely polished and of the highest visual quality. I’ve often described him as a “one man studio” and people are floored when they discover all the penciling, inking, coloring, lettering, layout, and professional-grade graphic design of a comic is all done by one person.
My work, on the other side of the table, has a very do-it-yourself feel to it. I work in black-and-white so you can see every one of my pen strokes, and for years I hand-lettered all my comics. The cover of the first Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire omnibus is a pencil sketch of the titular character. No one has a hard time believing it was all done by one person.
And I love that our comics, side-by-side, represent the full scope of what you make into a comic. The super polished studio-level production alongside a handmade comic. Full color digital alongside old fashioned pen-and-ink. The graphic design of an artist trained in its techniques alongside a scribbled title and a dream. Neither is more or less valid than the other, because all comics made with love and passion are beautiful.
I’m looking forward to DragonCon weekend for many reasons, but among them is getting to see the realization dawn behind someone’s eyes as I explain to them, in person, what I just wrote about in today’s blog.