I am infamous for hating all of my own artwork. Ben Dilworth once stated: "You will one day draw the best comic ever. Next day you'll look at it and say it's a pile of s---!"
He wasn't wrong!
Krakos Sands of Terror was once up for a cover of the year award. The reason it was withdrawn was due to the print on demand company I use losing a lot of data and that meant my cover was "not on sale" even though it was. I never worry too much about these things.
The character in a door way with a giant grasping hand about to grab him was "incredibly atmospheric". Let's not spoil that by saying it was not meant to be a giant grasping hand!
I think the cover works and draws the eye in and that is what a book cover should do. If I was going to re-introduce William A. Ward's character to a new audience after more than 70 years the cover had to be good. Of course, Ward's Krakis appears on the cover of Comic Bits 2
Come on -the Angel of the Burning Fire deservedsomething nice.
The same applied to anothjer Ward character The Bat (one of many bat characters from the 1920s-1950s). The character originallky appeared as a back up in Black Tower Adventures volume 1 but the story never concluded. I will not give away the story or what The Bat did but after he did it Lee Mondo wrote "What an utter cold b-----!" People who have seen the book, which ended with "in a church tower a Bat lies dying", have said similar and that the scene had such an effect is pleasing.
One thing about Ward's strips is that he worked in animation sothe strips are full of talking heads, static figures walking but some nice imagination used at points. So Krakos and The Bat had to be far more animated and be true to the original characters but what modern readers expect. As a copy of Krakos's origin was not found until after the Sands of Terror I had to improvise. My biggest surprise was finding that my origin was spot on with Ward's!
The Bat had a whole back story added including ancestral history. His beloved Stahlia was rather like a 1940s horror film set; witchcraft, Vampires, werewolves and even a Frankenstein. A neutral European Duchy that was occupied by Germans in WW2 the Soviets and then the hated Kamorans. The Bat was out to reclaim his country and it got a bit bloody.
Looking back at all of this work and many hundreds of other pages (I think someone estimate about 2000 pages) I could not decide what I considered to be my best work and that I liked. That is until I had to check something from the last volume of Adventure and The Green Skies. I have no idea what was going on aty the time but I looked at the art work and thought "That looks okay" and I think it will probably be my best but that is for others to decide.
I am not found of ego and I draw and wqrite what I like because companies are very restrictive and just want the same old stuff (usually movie or some modern comic "classic") for a 'new' book.
When it comes down to it what I draw and publish -it is not up to me to say what is my best. It's up to readers and that is where it ends.
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