New images from Pandora’s Garage Volume 2. The first two images are from El Samurai by Daniel Barton and one from the Original Johnny Vega black and white reprinted from Guilded Edges #6 . In this issue Dan was exploring his urban hero, Jesus Vasques. Dan was trying to capture the feel of the old Sergio Leone spegetti westerns as well as the a Quentin Tarantino feeling to add as well along the way. Dan was and still is learning the ways of comics though he is fairly knowledgeable of the old Kirby books from Marvel. But like all writers (including myself) find it hard to stay on target with all the ideas running through our heads to put down on paper.
His art style was growing by leaps. With this particular story you got the feeling that it was a modern piece of graphic fiction than something that was set in the past like the first installment. But there was definitely a heavy lean on the computer to help the work along.
My hope was that he wouldn’t depend to render his work so much on the computer that his story would suffer for the sake of the art being shown.
Of course I could point that finger at myself as Johnny Vega -in color! uses a heavy amount of digital work. I think that the biggest difference between myself and Dan was the fact that I had already developed a pen and ink, black and white style before I started on the computer . If you compare the images of Johnny Vega now and then there is style that comes though. It was topic when the Guild was meeting together when I was approached by TACKE. This was a name that I gave a young guy because he didn’t understand that there was a time and a place to call about questions about making comic books but not at 10:30pm.
TACKE had these grandieous ideas of t-shirts and other merchandise. I had told him it was great that he had the ideas but if didn’t have a good story or art nobodys gonna wanta buy a t-shirt. Then I could see that this wasn’t getting through to him. So I put to him like this if you didn’t have a skeleton what have you got? He said I don’t know. I tell you, a blob of flesh. And right now that what you got. You need to really work on your story. When I look back I know that I probably shot him down real hard but he would’ve dropped lots of money on something that he would never get anything back as a return.
Needless to say he never did work on it again. It was to bad because TACKE could have had something cool to look at it if he had kept at it. But thats back then not now.