Around 1997 I started working on a story summing up my years in Austin, Texas through the experiences of a young, gay (in every sense of the word) would-be writer named Guard Tindell. But the real impetus of the story was the invitation by Tom Devlin to do a story for his anthology
Coober Skeber that would be published in two
Pantone colors, as
David Mazzucchelli had famously done a few years early in his story "Discovering America" in
Rubber Blanket #2. Well,
Coober Skeber #3 never saw the light of the day but I finished the comic and named it "Night of the Grossinator", after a silly toy my friend Penny got her hands on.
I have uploaded a digital version of the comic approximating the two-color (three if you include the transparent overlays--and you must, you must!) scheme.
You can read the whole comic
here for free.
As you can see from the opening image, there has been an Italian edition, a one-shot that was part of a series published by the Centro Fumetto Andrea Pazienza called Schizzo Presenta (Schizzo being their flagship anthology—not sure if it's still coming out). Looking around online I found that you can apparently still order a copy here.
You can see a panel of Mazzucchelli's "Discovering America" in my post about my similarly two-color Top Shelf anthology cover here. Also, here's a little bonus from Mastering Comics showing you all the different layers of one panel plus a jarring but expedient version of the overlay using available colors cyan and magenta:
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| detail from Mastering Comics chapter 11 (click to enlarge) |
So whither the print edition of "Night of the Grossinator", you may ask? Well, my ambition is to find someone to publish a book collecting the best of my early work, from minis up to about 2000. My idea is to call the book Black Candy and Other Comics and it would include all of Black Candy, long out of print, short comics like "NoTG", "Aranda's Coat", "Sayonara" and other uncollected work that, I think, best represents the early part of my career (ending around where I launched simultaneously into Odds Off and 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style). Is that a book that you would buy? Let me know what you think and/or bug your favorite publishers.
Bonus trivia: the name Guard Tindell comes from a security guard who worked at the library at UT Austin. I walked in one time and he had an index card sign propped up on his guard's table with a hand-written note saying, "Good luck on your finals" and signed, "Guard Tindell".
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