The last day of my graphic novel sale is Wednesday! Thanks!
Drawn while I was in school, this picture of the Knights of the Holy Grail is reproduced from a very poor quality, non-professional photo slide. Quite a bit of restoration needed.
The original art was sold at a convention many years ago, and recently came up at an estate auction. The buyer kindly allowed me to buy it back. Unfortunately, whoever owned it all those years ago did not archive it properly, and the original art is pretty much destroyed. It doesn’t help that a lot of my earlier drawings were done in cheap magic markers which fade badly if they are over-exposed to light. I may be able to do a better restoration from the tattered original art at a later time.
I think this is pretty good work for a high school kid, anyway. Obviously, Aubrey Beardsley was a big influence.
When I got into professional comics, everyone forbade me to draw with pens. The popular prejudice is for brush work. To this day, I loathe brushwork for almost everything, and use pens. Better quality pens and inks, now, of course.
You were a prodigy!
what’s amazing is that, despite the fact that I already know who the grail knights are, I recognize them from the first book (Galahad, Lancelot and Percival). It’s great that even through all the permutations of the series, the character designs developed very early and have remained more or less intact since the beginning.
Well, some of the earliest designs are pretty grim: Minetti was once an American Indian with feathers in his hair. It’s pretty awful. I think I was beginning to develop some sense of cultural/racial awareness because I decided to remove the most obvious (I hope) cliches.
On the other hand, characters like Jason, Galahad, Corrine, Serezha and others have hardly changed at all.
oh lord XD here I thought Brent was the one giving off the Billy Jack vibe! Especially the original first b/w penciled preview. The hair plus the jeans and bare chested vest queue up “One Tin Soldier” in my head. I can’t even with Minetti.
Wow. Thank you for not going there.
*cough cough* If you have any early Corrine/Dunstan pics, those would look good up here on the blog
totally unsung minor characters in need of some blog love, just sayin
Those would be very funny! A Distant Soil started out as a superhero yarn, so some of the sketches show them in costumes! Just awful! I think by the time I was 14, I’d simply run with the central story and abandoned the superhero stuff.
Brent was based on a guy I knew in high school.
I dumped the Indian, and based Minetti on the police chief at the department my dad worked at at the time.
It’s gorgeous work. A pity about the original. But I understand how it could happen.
I too used to work with felt-tip pen, the ordinary water-soluable type ink. I’d done one Tolkien illustration of Galadriel and Yavanna by the Two Trees (well, hanging branches of them anyway), very detailed on the leaves and flowers. Sent it off to a journal editor. A month or so later, he had to send it back to me for repair. He’d set it down near his fish tank, and it had gotten splashed on one corner when he was feeding the fish. Lots of white-out later, I decided the time had come to switch over to india ink and rapidographs.
Fascinating that the original came back to you – even if in sorry state.
I have a career that has lasted long enough that I now see my work at estate auctions. OMG.