Passchendaele - Page #001 pencils!

Hey, Steemit! It’s getting late here in the Twin Cities. I’m sitting in a muggy living room listening to The Cramps and formatting some artwork for tonight’s blog post. I caved today and installed the air conditioner. I can’t deal with heat. Cold, I can do all year long […which is why Minneapolis isn’t a problem for me], but you can only take so much clothes off […ask @eveuncovered]. In a couple of weeks, we’re having central air and a industrial grade HEPA filter installed in our home, but for these two weeks, we needed some relief from what is feeling like a very early summer […extra sucky after an extremely late winter because the Spring and Fall are my favorite seasons]. 

Tonight, I wanted to share a page from an ashcan comic book I’m working on with my long time friend @ghostfish. A few months ago, we decided to collaborate on a story I came up with a few years ago while listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episode “Blue Print for Armageddon”. He went in to painful detail about the lesser known battle of Passchendaele. A living Hell for the soldiers that fought in relentless rain across the fields of France. Conditions so bad that thousands of soldiers […on both sides] lost their lives to the mud that swallowed them.

This story focuses on a German soldier named Otto who shot and killed an Allied Aussie soldier, Ira. Ira, taking a bullet to the face, died instantly and slid down the embankment of a mortar Otto has been stuck in for [assumably] days already. Our story picks up as the threads of Otto’s sanity begin to fray, engaging in a conversation with a clearly deceased Ira. The two talk about life, family and death. The whole time, the water level in the muddy depression rises.

We’re doing this story as an ashcan comic that will be printed in the DIY tradition of Kinko’s or Office Max, then littered across coffee shops and comic shops in the Twin Cities, LA and NYC. I love working with @ghostfish. We’re extremely like minded in the stories we want to tell and the art we appreciate. I’m getting together with him early next week to refine the story and dialog and break some ideas for a follow up story or issue. More to come, but for now, enjoy the pencils for page one.

Thanks for reading. For more illustration, comics, photography and the stories behind the work, follow me at @kommienezuspadt and @ghostfish at his blog.