The Digital Edition
The Digital Edition
I realise that not many people will get the grape nei-hi reference anymore. It was a favourite beverage of Radar from MASH (a tv show sitcom about the Vietnam War). Radar was the wide-eyed farm boy who was just beginning to experience the world.
This is one of those moments where I feel like I’m having to explain the joke, or the parallels used to describe the character. It’s merely my intention to provide this commentary just to give a little extra insight into what went into the comic.
This gets drawn out a bit. Like any good awkward moment.
The beginning of the bar scene. The challenging part of this was trying to reconcile art styles. I wanted the bar patrons to be a little more complex than Isaac and Lee. I modelled the bartender after an old Sunday comic strip.
If the pidgeons are this bad, can you imagine what the patrons of the bar are like?
This scene is a rare one in that it was actually a request. A friend, and co-worker, of mine wanted to die in one of my comics.
Now Isaac & Lee is, not only a drama, but also a dramatised version of actual events so I began thinking about how I would kill off his character (who hadn’t been introduced yet). I don’t know if he was serious about wanting to be in the comic, but he had presented a writing challenge to me and I felt obligated to rise to meet this challenge. But how?
Then one day life decided to give me his story. They say that life is stranger than fiction and his story is no exception. He was at a different job and he was on his lunch break. He unwrapped his sandwich and began eating it. All of a sudden, a seagull swooped down, attacked him (giving him some very deep cuts that probably needed stitches) and took off with his sandwich. The basic story was strange enough, but my mind decided to run with the story and make it even more bizarre than the original.
Looking back, I’m not sure why I changed the bird from a seagull to a pidgeon. Maybe because I feel that pidgeons are funnier than seagulls, I’m not sure.
What I like about this scene is that it sets the stage for what happens in the bar. In the same way that the guy outside the bar is eaten alive, so too is Lee.
I remember this page taking way longer than it should have to produce. Another page that I look at and realise how much I’ve changed. For those of you just tuning in, I am reminiscing on old pages of Isaac & Lee that I created a few years back now. This is also the time when I started exploring blacks more in my work. The big reason for this is because it was the same time that I started using Ka-Blam to publish my books. I have to admit, it certainly gave me a little more creative freedom to explore more things artistically in this book.
I like to think of Isaac & Lee as a melodrama.
Anne may be Lee’s voice of reason but that doesn’t mean he actually listens to what she has to say.
This is the first appearance of Lee’s roommate Anne. While Lee is the logical one compared to Isaac. Anne is Lee’s voice of reason when he flies off the handle. Also, this is the first appearance of Lee’s home, I had a lot of fun designing the kitchen.
The very top cover is the original cover for issue #3 but over the years, I decided to give the books a bit of a facelift.