Proving Points in Song Format

Still playing catch up. Sorry to barrage with all these updates at once, as another’s going to follow shortly after this (once I can get my scanner to cooperate! goddamn scanner). Here’s a blast from the past. This is from an old concept I had brewing a few years back. It was basically about a garage band from NJ that stumbled onto a world tour & the trail of a lost notebook with special songs written in it, much like the sutras of the Chinese epic Journey to the West. Only instead of demons, spiderwomen, & ox-kings, this band fought luchadors, ninjas, & nazis along the way. That, in turn made it a little too similar to another comic about a rock band that only I found out about after outlining five GN’s worth of material & scripting half the first. Yeah. So ultimately, this is something I’d love to come back to, but I know there’d be a huge contingent of people who’d pick it up, read it, & think I was just stealing that other comic’s gig. Really, all the things I’m intentionally trying to steal come from the same Chinese epic Toriyama’s Dragonball came from.

From left to right, you have the drummer, the guitarist, & the bass player. Vocal duties got split between the latter two. I have my idea of what they’d sound like, but one of the few upsides of working with a mute medium is that we can each have our own idea of what they sound like & no one’s would necessarily be wrong. Not pictured is the enemy they defeat that eventually joined them as their tour van driver, & their manager who seems to have some pretty high level connections in order to make seemingly impossible things happen. What stinks though too is I had other scenarios for these characters beyond even that initial world tour story. Like time travel stories. Proper time travel stories with the ontological paradoxes ironed out & making perfect sense with allusions to it throughout it all.

Ugh.

I’d still love to do it. And occasionally, I get these kind of urges to just say fuck it. I mean it’s not that I intentionally pulled anything from that other rock band comic. It was original to me when I thought it up. We both just came to the same conclusions. But at the same time though, to me, there’s still something cheap about putting out something people have already seen before. That’s a job for the Big Two, not me.

I kid.