Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

In early 2011 I started but never finished a new Miizzzard comic. I planned to draw the whole thing in Photoshop and then color it like my acrylic paintings. Particularly, I wanted to tell the story of a battle between the Miizzzard and the Wojrollox, as depicted in this 2010 painting:

The Wojrollox Chomps the Miizzzard; the Miizzzard Attacks with Frogheads and Laser Vision

Here are the first 11 pages of the story:

I drew all these “pencils” in less than an hour in January 2011. I was going to go back later and color them but I never did. I’m not sure why I didn’t keep going on this comic after I exhausted my initial wave of excitement. I think that all that coloring seemed too time consuming. In June 2011 I started Vortex on a whim. I revisited the idea of coloring a comic like my paintings for Skew (with a much more simple process) and recycled part of the plot for my comic for Future Shock #7.

Sparkplug Books is running a Kickstarter campaign to publish my graphic novel Vortex and Elijah Brubaker’s Reich #12. I’m doing a series of blog posts called The Hiizzztory of the Miizzzard that show how the protagonist of Vortex has evolved over the years.

In 2009 and 2010 I switched from longer comics like Hyperbox to one-page comics because I was submitting to newsprint anthologies like Smoke Signal and Secret Prison. In 2009 I also got a Wacom tablet and MangaStudio and made the switch from ink drawing to pixel drawing. It’s saved me so much time that I spent scanning and fixing things in Photoshop! The main danger of digital drawing is the allure of endless undos.

Here are some one-page Miizzzard comics that were part of a larger series of loosely connected one- and two-page comics called ATTACKS:

First appearance of the Floating Crystal Witch and the current look of the Miizzzard. Originally published online by Reynard Seifert at hahaclever.com.

The sequel to the previous comic. Originally published online by Jason Leivian at Arthur Mag.

The end of this first trilogy of comics about the Miizzzard and the Floating Crystal Witch. I drew this in black and white in 2010 to submit to Taffy Hips, but it was the wrong size. Josh Burggraf colored it for me as a Christmas surprise in 2012.