The Savage She-Hulk-- Dancing With the Damned! (Patreon)

OK-- phew! I cringe at a lot of my old, bad artwork, and this features a lot of old bad artwork... and yet I have huge fondness for this story. I loved working on this-- I felt so immersed in comics and comic book culture at the time and, even if I lacked the ability, I genuinely wanted to let my love of the medium show on every panel. Aided by some fantastic and generous colourists, I was able to bring to life a She-Hulk tale like no other I had done before!

I guess my two big influences on this comic were Grant Morrison's X-Men (hence the outlandishness of the mutants) and Erik Larsen's  Savage Dragon. I even managed to get Erik to look at my work-- sadly he was only able to view the cover , which he said looked 'sweet!'. And he was right, but unfortunately that cover was the work of amazing fan-artist Tom Burgos and the peerless painting of Eegore!

 I actually took pages of this to comic conventions and showed them at portfolio sessions. Dear reader, I did not get a call to come and work for the big 2. Cringe!

I got the name of the Grey Lantern from the title of an album-- 'Attack of the Grey Lantern' by Manson.

Showing the age of this comic-- all the reference material I needed for this had to be sourced-- with great difficulty-- at the central library! I was still on dial-up back in those days, and surfing for images on the net was both costly and time consuming. And, because there were no hi-def images, finding pictures in books was actually better! I'm always so amazed at the convincing detail in older comic books, knowing that the artists must have had a nightmare tracking down reference photos. That's easily a days work in itself! Google images truly is revolutionary.

Because uploading on domestic dial-up was so time consuming, I actually put all these pages onto about three floppy disks and took them to an internet cafe right before my shift at a call centre. I remember it was agony waiting for it to be over-- I really wanted to check the message board of my yahoo group to see what people thought! Lord, I feel so old writing that--- floppy disks! Internet cafes! Dial-Up Modems! These are items from a lost world.

I never got around to the sequel-- life got in the way, I guess. Back in 2002 I had a job that started in the afternoon which meant I got the mornings to draw. Shortly after completing this, my hours changed to regular 9 to five, and after that I kind of got sidetracked on to other things. I'd still like to go back and do issue 2 some day!