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A comics journey

Aug 09, 2024

I don’t want to stamp no labels on ya, but the moment you bounced through the door you cuddled up to the Handbuzzer Set! Time to leave the Squares behind, pops. You’re ‘bout to be privy to some pretty groovy, top secret stash. Make no mistake, hepcats and kitties, we gonna get real gone. Cos you’re in with the in crowd now, baby. Whatever you do . . . be cool.

Slide on your Wayfarer shades or your cat-eye specks, drop your beret to a daring tilt, and slip into some open-toed sandals. Oh, yeah, now you’re cooking with gas. You’re way-way-out, man. And strictly on the buttered side.

Get ready to snap some fingers, baby, we’re ‘bout to dig into that STASH. It’s time to HOOOOWL!

The password is (bongo intro) “NOWHERESVILLE."

Tag Line: A crime cocktail with a beatnik twist.

Synopsis: Dig this, daddy-o! A 1950s Greenwich Village beatnik seeks love and spiritual enlightenment, but instead finds himself embroiled in a mystery involving a murdered exotic dancer, a thrill-killing mobster, a hopped-up bebop jazz drummer, a ruthless Hollywood starlet, and a crooked cop. This cat is on an espresso-fueled, riffs-n-stiffs, one-way trip to nowheresville!

WARNING: The following has not been vertically formatted and is not “phone-friendly”. Sorry, dad. You gotta go retro this go-round.

Caliber Comics published the very first Nowheresville comic in 1992.

This image is pretty fuzzy. I took it off a comics retailer site. I can’t find any of my copies. Probably in a box, in a closet, never to be seen again.

Anyway, I did find a page to scan so you can see how it looked way back when.

Notice that the zipatone* has yellowed with time and neglect. I used to poorly handprint the lettering, too. And I used rapidograph pens to ink on paper!! Those were the days before I got my hands on a Cintiq. I don’t miss those days at all.

*Zipatone is so 1990s. It came in sheets and you would have to cut away bits and place them on the art wherever you wanted a gray tone. One mistake and you’d be drawing the page over again.

The great Guy Davis turned me onto this toning process when I was developing a Caliber series called “Twilight People.” He had successfully used Zipatone on his Caliber series “BAKER STREET.” If you’re not familiar with Guy, go here.

Caliber published six issues. The 48 page special, the four part “Death by Starlight” issues, and the anthology “Nowheresville: The History of Cool” that featured contributions from comics luminaries like Brian Michael Bendis, Galen Showman, Will Pfeifer, and Phil Hester.

In 2002, I published the entire collection at Image Comics.

I cleaned up the art, replaced my (crappy) lettering with a comics font, and added new scenes illustrated by me and by Galen Showman. Brian Michael Bendis wrote the foreword. The Zipatone survived the changes.

The book got mixed reviews, but over the years people have commented that it’s one of their favorite graphic novels from that time. So many kind words have driven me to revamp/modernize/hopefully improve the whole thing . . . AGAIN. This time with color, new lettering, new balloons, text edits, new art/text, and art tweaks. It’s also gonna be Zipatone free (a painful extraction).

Here’s a sneak peek of my progress. The first of many. Wish me luck.