Speaking of con sketches, here is one I did for a fan who was building a collection of art inspired by Alphonse Mucha. I’m a Mucha fan myself– I look at his art when I’m designing the fancy bits of the Galaxion– and I had a lot of fun drawing this. The fan in question was happy to provide me with some excellent copies of the original that he purchased, so I can still enjoy it myself. And that’s the end of another Galaxion retrospective! I hope it was coherent (I’m typing this very late at night), and I hope you enjoyed it. The next one will be… in June? Hmm, well, keep coming back for the regular comics and I’ll keep you posted!

Hee hee! This is one of the pieces that used to sit out on the convenion table, back when Franz and I only had a couple of issues of minicomic to our names. Con sketches, drawing in front of people, still make me nervous! Especially when I’m sitting next to brilliant artists who seem to effortlessly throw brilliant pieces of art onto any old piece of paper put in front of them. But I suppose as long as I do cons, I will do con sketches! It’s just one of those things. One more and you’re done!

This one is the very first page of the very first issue of the Galaxion story in the minicomic flip book Salmagundi! This is the true first appearance of Fusella and Darvin (and Aria!), rather than the pages I picked out for their retrospectives. But since they don’t even have a speaking part on this page I picked more interesting pages for them.I used the narration box here in my attempts to get into Aria’s head and make her more immediately appealing to reader. I still find the technique a bit awkward to use and so I mostly avoid it, but every so often it does the trick.

Somewhere, perhaps it was on the forum, I made the comment that this introductory story segment that took me only one page to tell in Salmagundi took me three pages to tell in the full-size print comic, and took me five pages in the webcomic. I still can’t quite decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Getting near the end, but keep going!

And here we have one of the first comic pages I ever drew, one of a non-sequential set of three I made to test out how well Galaxion the novel would translate to Galaxion the comic. Too bad I went and inked the living daylights out of it. (Note to younger self: learn when to stop noodling around!) It was around the time I decided to make a comic that Aria gelled into the character through whom the readers would experience the story. Previous to this, it was either Zan or Scavina or just a big ensemble story-telling style. I don’t think it’s as clear in the current webcomic version who the main character actually is!

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This was an pre-comic concept sketch from 1990 of how the standard uniform might be adapted to suit Contact Team activities. Fortunately I came to my senses. The last thing the comic world needs is another superhero style unitard. I don’t know what kind of freaky world she’s on with the cotton-candy trees and all. It was just one of those colour experiments that didn’t work out! I shortened her hair so that it’s merely “long” instead of Crystal Gayle long, but I haven’t yet graduated to actually putting it up. That’s the next stage….

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I had a lot of fun drawing Aria’s long hair! It had to be some mark of maturity when I finally accepted the fact that such long hair flowing loose was just utterly impractical for someone whose job it is to be a front-line explorer. Sigh. More!

I did studies like this for a couple of the characters, thinking that it was the sort of thing real artists were supposed to do… before I got bored with making them. Good thing I never had any aspirations to be an animator, because I never would’ve made it through! click to continue!

Actually, Aria has been for me one of the most difficult characters to pin down. For the longest time her primary purpose in the story was to be one half of the main romantic couple, and that was about it. She was sweet and even-tempered and a bit shy and… dull as a butter knife, I eventually realized. I told myself that this was OK, that it made her a good neutral voice for the narrator of the story, but let’s be honest– when your lead character is boring, your story is in trouble. So I tried to flesh her out a little with objects, such as (in the early days of the comic)giving her a pet cat and a collection of books that resemble the ones on my own shelf. These helped somewhat. But even though I’ve worked with this character for 25 years, I still have a tough time getting inside her head. Maybe it’s because she is the one I identify with the most. Go figure. More!

Remember that picture of Darvin dressed as a pirate? This drawing plainly went with it. Man, I sure wish I could recall what the story was behind these costumes….

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1984… that’s Aria and Zan, and good grief that’s a pretty serious moptop he’s got growing there. I mentioned that Aria wasn’t always the lead character of the story; at times it was Zan. But we’ll discuss him another day. There was a time when blaster guns were a regular feature of the Galaxion universe, right along with a whole array of alien-race bad guys and ship-mounted laser cannons. And little one-man fighter ships too, just like the Black Tiger Squadron! And then at some point I realized I wasn’t really interested in telling a story about a big war, and the Galaxion began to mutate into more of a science ship.

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