Finally! Back to actually DRAWING something!
Goodness me, is it Wednesday already?
This week was one of those piecemeal, bits-and-pieces weeks in the world of Steamroller Man, working on website stuff and writing more of issue four, but I did finally get back to actually drawing some Steamroller Man after what seems like months!
For the print versions of each issue of Steamroller Man, I intend to add a couple of brand new, extra pages, as a little extra bonus for those who have already read the story online (if you are new to Steamroller Man, I publish new pages to the web as I complete them, at steamrollerman.com - I have three issues up there so far, all free to read). These new pages are not published as part of the online version of the story, so hopefully they are also an incentive to pick up a print copy! I created a double-page spread for the first issue that turned out quite nicely:
The thing is, I didn’t create the story with these extra pages baked in. I’m adding them in after the story is completed (at least in that issue), trying to figure out a point where two pages could be added without breaking the page flow, and also not disrupting the pacing. Issue One had a lot of scene changes, cutting back and forth, so it was easy to add this extra beat to the fight scene in the middle of the story.
Issue Two is one continuous series of events, following Steamroller Man and Paige the whole time. It was more of a challenge to figure out where I could expand things, and ultimately I realized it wasn’t going to be possible! There weren’t really any spots where I could easily open things up without having to go back and modify the existing pages to accommodate the change. So I’m taking a different approach. I’m going to use these extra pages to introduce some other characters, in self-contained single page gags. Here’s the first one:
This will be kind of a pin-up style, one-page “Imaginary Story” image, featuring a new character - Steamroller Man’s Girlfriend, RHODA RASCH! Rhoda is a relatively new creation of mine, inspired by something a lot of my readers seem to have more knowledge of than I do.
Since starting the comic, I’ve gotten a lot of comments (and I do mean A LOT) along the lines of “Steamroller Man… is that a Jojo reference?”
At first I was completely baffled. What’s a “Jojo Reference”? I wondered. Fortunately my son is more tuned in to pop culture than I am these days, and quickly solved the mystery for me. It turns out there was a shot in one episode of an anime cartoon called Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure where one character throws a steamroller at another. It’s become a whole thing, apparently - what do you know, it’s even a GIF:
In the cartoon, the character calls the steamroller a “ROAD-A ROLLAHHH!” in this shot. So I thought that if Steve Rollerman had a wife, her name could be Rhoda Rollerman. But then, what would her maiden name be?
Rhoda Rasch was born!
I don’t know if Rhoda will ever make it into an actual story, but I liked the idea of doing an homage to one of my favorite Silver Age comics, Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane. If you’ve been following my work for a while, you can probably tell I have a fondness for vintage comic cover designs! I’ve homaged 1970s Marvel and 1950s EC covers, and have wanted to do a Silver Age DC-style cover for a while.
DC’s Silver Age comics are typified by their general absurdity, and nowhere is that more evident than in issues of Lois Lane and its companion book, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. The Lois Lane stories are fascinating to me because they are such an artifact of 1950s America. Despite being an independent woman with a successful career (the top reporter at the Daily Planet newspaper), in issue after issue of her comic, all Lois seemed to want was to marry Superman, have his children and become a housewife! Of course, Superman resisted her at every turn, often playing tricks on her to “teach her a lesson”! Yikes!
I was going to say something about the subtext of these stories, but to be honest, it’s not really that “sub-”… it’s pretty much there on the surface level! This comic was aimed at pre-adolescent girls, so it certainly leaves one flabbergasted to think of the messages this title was sending to its young readers’ impressionable minds each month! But I digress…
My Rhoda Rasch image will be black-and-white in the pages of the printed comic, but I’m thinking of making a print of the color version and giving that away as either an Early Backer bonus or an Overseas Backer bonus during the Kickstarter campaign.
The other bonus page will be — well, I’ll get to that later.
Thanks for reading and subscribing, and as always - Keep Rolling!
Matt