jkcarrier: first haircut after lockdown (Default)
jkcarrier ([personal profile] jkcarrier) wrote2014-12-17 11:27 pm

12 Days of Classic Comics Christmas Day 5

The countdown continues at http://classiccomics.boards.net/thread/987/fifth-classic-comics-christmas-2014
Here's my pick for Day 5:



5) Nuance #3 (1990)

This one's a personal milestone: This anthology comic represents my first published work, and it came about through sheer dumb luck. I'm a life-long comics fan, and I'd often drawn little strips and things for my own amusement, but never gave any serious thought to trying to get published. In 1990, I was working at a screenprinting company. I often brought in comics to read during my lunch hour, and one particular day I had a copy of Cerebus: High Society on my desk. A new hire, a guy named Tyim Courts, was being shown around the office, and he spotted the book. He was a big Cerebus fan too, and we started chatting. It turned out he was putting together an anthology comic with a bunch of local cartoonists, and invited me to submit something. I wrote and pencilled a short story called "You Can't Teach Karma to a Caveman" (with inking by Tomm Gabbard), and Tyim printed it in Nuance #3. It's not very good (the real star of the book was Tyim's own brilliant strip "Experiencing Technical Difficulties"), but it got me to approach cartooning more seriously, and from there I started publishing my own mini-comics, and later webcomics. Making comics is such a big part of my identity now, it's hard to imagine what my life would be like if Tyim and Nuance hadn't given me that initial push.