CURSE of the VESSEL

I'm guessing the best place to start would be with the project that brought me back to working in comics, and that would be the Curse of the Vessel.  Back at the beginning of 2010 I joined Facebook and was delighted to find a great community of comic book artists and writers!

One artist whose work I really enjoyed was Danny Kelly.  I loved his simple yet powerful style, and he was very prolific... posting tons of great material daily.  What caught my attention was Danny's pencils of one of my favorite characters, The Phantom!  He indicated that if anyone wanted to ink the piece, to go ahead -- so I did!

As luck would have it, inking that piece led writer Michael Leal to contact me.  Michael was working with Danny at that time on Curse of the Vessel, to enter into the then annual Small Press Idol Contest from Dimestore Productions.  The big prize of the contest was that the winner would see their book published.  And Michael and Danny had just lost their original inker on the project, so Michael asked if I would be willing to take over the task.  Always one to take calculated risks, I agreed.

Danny would send me hi-res scans of his artwork, which I would then print out and ink on a lightbox (I didn't have my Cintiq tablet yet) using a Gillot steel pen nib, #3 series 7 Windsor-Newton brush and various Pentel markers (mostly for background elements and borders).  I would then scan in the pages and make minor corrections as well as add blacks and then send them along to the 4th member of our team, colorist supreme Michael McElveen.

The good news is we went on to win the contest and see the book published.  And here are a couple examples of Danny's original pencils along with my inked pages.