Process and Print, pt. 1

One rainy day in early winter '10, I was sitting languidly on our hand-me-down couch from the urban gardeners across the street, and flipped through a collection of Alex Toth's Zorro comics from the late 50's. Trying to digest three Booches' burgers and two pints of pale ale, the cushion's broken spring stabbing my rump, and I couldn't have been happier. The weather was perfect for ruminating, and I had a brand new tome of Toth to savor between naps. Somewhere in that afternoon, I concocted a healthy desire to write a Zorro story, and give myself an excuse to draw him, and a conversation with myself about the character. After reading Toth's foreword, I was reminded of my own childhood fascination with the character. That foreword, and his brilliant landscapes and eye for composition, of course I wanted to challenge myself. and here we are:

The crafty fox had gotten into my brain.

 I immediately tried to develop further context around the character. I wanted to see what had been said about him already. My first impression of Zorro was the Disney show, starring Guy Williams, that played in the 50's. (The same show much of Toth's scripts were based on, only he based his Zorro on a mix of Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn, and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.) Delving deeper into the legend, I started to ponder what other characters Zorro had met on his travels, what other heroes he'd faced with a grin.

Bat vs. Fox! En Garde!

It occurred to me that I'd been wanting to write another short story focusing on a major character, and that in many versions of Batman's origin, he's been watching Zorro in the theater with his family the night they were slain. In Batman's world, Zorro was a fictional character, and in realm of fiction (and outside) was in many ways influenced Bruce's vigilantism. So, the mojo was mixin, and I needed a story I actually cared about. I focused on the parallels between both men, and their methods. Wits, training, nerve, eccentricity, and a hidden talent for acting. Weapons. Alignment. I had finding new ways of understanding both characters and quickly started filling sketchbooks with thumbnails and layouts, bits of dialogue and narration. Every page was labored over numerous times.

Final page going once, twice...

Three times!

With many starts and stops (I inked the second page, only to be separated from my studio at that time by the snow) I began to work on the story proper off and on for almost a year. At first, I was so impatient to start. but the intervening months have proved invaluable to my body of work and development. By the time I was halfway through

Early summer

the brush had really loosened up, and I felt a slightly different vibe from the beginning. But, the momentum was back, and I spent my free time between other projects tweaking BatZorro. I wanted to see the resolution of the confrontation I arranged.

Put on the finishing touches today.

If you add it up, my rate was a little more than a page a month. As the pages filled, I grew more aware of the encroaching issue of publishing. I couldn't wait to get this stuff online, get it out to people, a few of whom had even heard about it before now. But, when I finally started lining up the pages, I knew that it was meant to be read. I had written the pages to be flipped, and while this gives me ideas about further digital publishing, I knew the issue of print publishing was at hand...
 
...and shall be explored as I further explore the process of self-publishing.

-Jam