Chelsea and Millie

Peripheral material/comics-related post #1 (of 2 — post 2 will be up sometime soon).

First up, a certain Cute Little Dead Girl…

A few months ago I did a guest pin-up for Roman Dirge’s Lenore Vol 2 #10, and today I thought I’d share that with you guys, plus a wee tale about Lenore and her impact upon me as a person and comic-maker.

Lenore #12 was the first “alternative comic”* I ever bought, way back in 2001. And it set me on the path of becoming a comic-maker.

I first discovered Lenore in 1997, via an interview with Roman in some tattoo magazine that my girlfriend at the time had, but it wasn’t until 2001 that I actually read any Lenore stuff, due to me living in rural New Zealand in the pre-Internet era (coming across a Lenore comic in such a place at such a time just wasn’t a thing that happened) when I read that magazine interview.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, that copy of Lenore #12 that I bought in an Auckland comic store in 2001 was pretty much my “gateway drug” into a whole world of inspiring comics, comics which up until that point had been completely under my radar.
I only really started doing comics myself in 2009 though — it took a lot of comic-reading and study, and general life-experiences, until I felt I was ready to commit to beginning to learn how to make my own comics (a process of development which was [and still is], for the main part, very much autodidactical — I have no formal art training to speak of. I actually have more tertiary qualifications in music than I have in art, and I haven’t had the need to use any music-theory for years), and by that time I’d “moved on” from Lenore and a bunch of other comics that had helped shape my comic-making sensibilities in my pre-formative period, i.e. in ze first coupla years of last decade.

Photo © Wendy Heather Wood
gilbertandgrim.com
commandercottontail.com

But recently I’ve been getting back into Lenore (it’s certainly way more developed now than it had existed in my mind all this time — i.e. its incarnation over a decade ago — which of course makes sense, as we all improve the more we do something, if we’re really into it, eh?), and it’s a pleasant bit of kismet that things have kinda come full circle now, and I ended up doing something that ended up in a Lenore comic.

So thanks very much Roman, for asking me to contribute a Lenore piccy (I’m sincerely rather honored to have been asked), and for inadvertently getting me into taking my initial tentative steps towards eventually giving making comics a proper go.

MV.

* Whatever the heck that particular clichéd phrase means these days. Alternative to what? DC & Marvel? Then that’s all other comics…
I admit I feel the phrase “alternative comics” is much more a hollow marketing hook than it is a supposedly meaningful/functional/useful term to utilize within bibliographical categorization-related endeavors.