I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted to post today. I haven’t drawn anything worth posting in about two weeks so I knew I had to kind of dig into the vault. I have some stuff I’m waiting to show and I just got all my old artwork as a kid back but haven’t had the time to scan stuff in. There’s some gems in there I’m sure. I wanted to post about a client I finally finished some work for but since my last post was sort of a negative rant I hate to give you two of those in one week.

I’d say one of the more disappointing things I’ve ever attempted was trying to run a online comic strip site. I thought I had a pretty good idea. It was called Cold Case Comics (still love the name) and the idea was to post comic strips geared towards the pulp flavored characters.

I had met a guy named Martin Powell here in the cities. Martin has an impressive resume working with Dean Haspiel in the 80’s on a character called The Verdict. He also has written graphic novels for Moonstone based on Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes. Currently you can read his short stories in Kolchak and Night Stalker and The Spider prose novels.

After some conversation we decided to start a comic strip called The Phantom Shadow. The look of the character is taken from a childhood character I started drawing after seeing the Bruce Timm Batman cartoon in the early 90’s.

The idea was that The Phantom Shadow was a twin cities based avenger in the 1930’s. Martin and I both have a huge interest and love for the mob history that took place in Minnesota during that time peroid and wanted to tie the character to the folklore and urban legends to create a fantastic tale with our costumed vigilante. His main rival would be a sinister organization called the Skull Society, which were prominent and well know people of society that gathered to make decisions on the state of the city. Here’s a sketch.

Sadly we only put out about 9 strips. I greatly enjoyed doing them but sadly both Martin and my schedule just couldn’t pump out the work that we needed to keep an audience’s attention. The other strips on the site also had the same problem and we eventually closed the site late last year. I hope to one day tell the stories we wanted to tell with the character. For now we’ll settle for the pages we have.

Adding insult to injury Martin had planned on adding another strip called Dr. Tombs to the site, which was to drawn by the awesome Pat Oliffe of Spider-Man fame. Here’s some sketches they sent me.

Brent