Hey there sports fans Al here with the latest:
Back to comic illustration because - reasons.
Well there’s one thing I can say right now and it’s about a character that I’ve worked on for probably the last 10 years or so and it was one character that stood out amongst all the other characters that I have ever created - Corpse Cop!
You may ask yourself why in the world would you be going back to that character again? A wisecracking zombie? The answer is simple because it’s fun.
About 10 years ago Corpse Cop was created as a personal response to all the zombie-type craze that was sweeping through comic books, TV shows, and movies that all featured mindless zombies trying to eat humanity and all that comes from dealing with that. But what I wanted to do was to make a character that was a zombie but was self-aware of who and what he was. The tagline was supposed to be "He kills other zombies because they cut into his food supply."
I just thought that was kind of a funny thing to say.
But after finishing "Last Monster on Earth" and waiting for my editor to get back to me on it I still had that itch for doing comic books. I was done working Corrax the Seeker years ago after being shot down and never really thought about going back to The Johnny Vega universe but there was a character that stood out from Johnny, Corrax, and Robot Monster- my singular zombie of Corpse Cop.
Using the time travel trope I decided to re-introduce zombies into the Johnny Vega universe and this would be the second time. The first time would’ve been in Weird Atomic Tales when I was working with Jason Zachary Pott. Jason and I have been trying to work together on a project they did a crossover between our two characters Johnny Morbid and Johnny Vega. But Jason at the time had a hard time figuring out how to really flush out the story. In the interim, I had just come up with the character Corpse Cop in a mini-comic book that sold pretty well at one of the shows here in Portland. After that release, Jason realized as he said to me "there’s my that’s my Hell Cop."
Corpse Cop became a quick in high-demand character (as was Johnny Vega) between my independent comic book creator friends. One of them Adam Watson from Dark Slinger Comics wanted to do a crossover as well. And we did a crossover with Johnny Vega but nothing with Corpse Cop, unfortunately. But even today Adam is still after me for taking on the I.P. Of CC. Adam will tell you that we had the first cross-over in indy comics. The one thing I wanted to do with Corpse Cop, kind of like what I did with Johnny Vega, was to have the very mini much like ashcan editions that had come out a couple of years before. After the response that I received to Corpse Cop I transitioned the comic character into a scratchboard comic and that actually worked out pretty well in sales but not in time of production. The next two books (Corpse Cop #2 "Arctic Wolf" and Corpse Cop # "Inhuman Torch") were illustrated with a white marker on black paper which mirrored the scratchboard but offered a quicker turnaround time. But interest in creating comics VS single pieces of artwork with a much bigger payoff came into play. Well, that has worked out pretty good for me till Covid hit.
Though now years later after the comics I’ve gotten pretty good with scratchboard and how to render stuff and the speed to produce work I felt that I could go ahead and finish off one more Corpse Cop story. It would be a good sendoff for also Johnny Vega and the rest of his crew in the Johnny Vega Universe because I really don’t know if I will actually work on another comic book after I get done with this one and finally finish off with Richard Parker.
In my story outline in this future, Johnny Vega and the rest of his Ranger crew kidnap Corpse Cop from the present day and bring him to their future. Corpse Cop is tasked with fighting and infiltrating a giant robot that is literally breaking a planet apart and absorbing all of its energy displacing the people who live there. I had touched on the same process in a comic strip with Johnny Vega dealing with what was called a “Defoliator”. In that story, Vega was able to defeat the Machine. This time Corpse Cop was needed. The Defoliators had now become self-aware machines as opposed to their original designer, Methuselah Kcon. Nothing living could gain entrance to the inner working of the machine but Corpse Cop could.
The only hold-up sometimes is my depiction of Corvis Corrax. In recent times I had wanted to make the character a little more bird-like than the way I was illustrating him in Johnny Vega, Man of the Future. I had to back into my files on Facebook to find the illustration that I wanted to use. Funny thing is that Facebook has a separate listing for this image than the file I opened under Corvis Corrax.
And there you go a story set up and a send-off for all these characters until they may be called upon again.
And this kid is outta here.