FROM THE ARCHIVES: Issue One, Page Five

A bi-weekly, page by page look at my earlier work

Hello again! This week I’m bringing you another in my From The Archives series, where I revisit one of my earlier pages. I’m going in chronological order, so that those of you who have just discovered the comic can get caught up, while providing some insight into my creative process that will let long-time readers see the page in a whole new dimension!

So here he is, our hero in his civilian guise of Steve Rollerman. I based the structure of how this issue started on the 1960s Batman TV show. When I started working on this issue, I had just gotten the box set of the entire series on BluRay (which is excellent, by the way) and watching episodes in succession showed me the basic formula they used most often: they would usually start with the villain pulling a caper, then show Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson in their civilian life before they got the call on the Batphone, prompting them to change into the Dynamic Duo and spring into action. I decided to use a similar structure, and that’s why Steve Rollerman appears on page five rather than page one.

I wanted to do a full-page, full-body image of him, to give his introduction the maximum visual impact possible.

Also, at the time, the Distracted Boyfriend meme seemed to be everywhere on social media, so when I was drawing the bystanders in the background I thought that would be a fun little gag to add. If you avoid the internet and have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s an example of the meme I made just now:

Why did I have Steve starting to sing a song? Pretty much for the same reason I put anything into the story - it just seemed like a fun, bizarre thing to have happen in a superhero comic, and it made me laugh.

Like the last few pages I’ve posted from this issue, this is also a revised version of a previous page, but the changes here were much less extreme. I was pretty happy with the original page so on the second pass I only put a bit more detail into the background.

I’ll post some process pictures from this page behind the paywall! Thanks for reading!

Keep Rolling!

Matt