Hello everybody,
after the last post with my entry picture for the comic contest hosted by my good friend Lars kommienezuspadt I felt inspired browsing further through my archive.
(The contest called "Trial by Comics" is still open and you can check it out right here!)
If you haven't seen my entry, here it is once more.
This picture of Witchblade, Vampirella and Lady Death is still one of my favorite works.
I was a fan of all 3 characters, collected the books each month and also traveled from Germany to the publishers in the United States to show them my portfolio in person.
It was a crazy time...
So when Romano Molenaar and I finished this piece, he continued his works for Chaos! Comics and Image while I continued working on my own series called "intravenös: dead new world" and freelancing some more for the international role playing games market.
And then... 9/11 happened.
When I saw the very first news on German television it was one of the most unreal things I have seen in my life.
I remember how dramatically the whole world seemed to change from that day on.
And in the following months this happened to me:
Romano was still busy penciling book after book.
I remember when he told me that he would sometimes work on 2 different comics at the same time, which means 2 pages every day plus, I guess, he was still working as a graphic designer as his day job.
He was living in the Netherlands, I was living in Germany. We both were probably 2 hours away from each other.
After 9/11 the whole way of transportation changed. US customs double and tripple checked every package, international boxes got stuck at airports and Romano wasn't able to get some of his original pages to his inker in the States right in time.
He told me about it and asked if I could ink his cover page for a new series called "The Haunted". It was the variant cover for issue no. 02 - and my first big job in the American comic business. I was super stoked about it.
He overnighted the original page to me via FedEx, I inked it the next day, scanned it and e-mailed it to Chaos! Comics in Arizona.
Here are all three stages:
The following weeks got even tighter with deadlines and Romano said that he has the next job for me but wasn't sure if he could send me the original pages on time to do the inking. I suggested that he should just scan everything, I would print it out on good inking paper, do my job and e-mail the pages to our colorist in the States.
It was the first time for Romano to work this way (and not sending out his original pages to the inker) and we both were super happy that it all went so well. Everything was delivered right in time for print.
Here are some pages we did together; this was from "Purgatori: God Killer"
Like I said, crazy times but nice memories and always a good story to remember.
Have a good weekend,
Daniel
