Some of you may know that a quarter of a century ago I used to be a freelance comics artist and had my work published regularly in the national bi-weekly humour magazine for a couple of years or so. I showed some of my work in an old post HERE. I also said I might show more in the future, and the time has come! It is a 13-page tale that I drew to a story of a Lithuanian writer whose work we transformed into scripts for my comics.
The scans are from original art that I managed to get
back from the magazine when they were done with it. Note that original pages
are only A4 in size – roughly the same size as you can see them on your screen after
you click to enlarge. The introductory colour page is in water colours and Indian
ink, the rest are in Indian ink. I lettered them all myself but you can’t see original
lettering because this time I made an extra effort and translated the text for
my English-speaking readers.
There are a few things I would like to point out: the
story that the tale is based on was written in Soviet times; the author was a
humorist and satirist, and drinking was one of the vices of the society at the
time, hence the numerous situations involving alcohol in the story. Deficit was
another common thing at the time – it means that normal goods, like building materials
for example, weren’t easy to find. I altered the English version of the text a little bit
to make it more up-to-date, so to speak. If you can spot traces of the
influence of Terry Bave or Reg Parlett, that’s because I tried imitating them a
little bit; by the way, I found them a lot easier to copy than Robert Nixon’s
and Mike Lacey’s style.
Here is part one of the three-part series. Let me know
what you think :)
Come back soon for part two!
