Looking at Old Comics

I was looking through some old works I did. Felt these shouldn't be forgotten because not only does old artwork tell a story within the actual image. But the art itself tells a story as to where I've been, where I'm from, as my current artwork shows where I'm going. Here is a post from 2008 of a similar body of work as the one below. All these pieces were done within a year's time. Right before meeting Dora and starting Akumu I was going to begin working on a comic about a band that was touring in Japan and somehow a girl from the audience was to fall in love with the American guitar player. The whole idea was to revolve around the idea that they couldn't communicate through speech due to language barrier so they had to find ways around it. I was later told that this concept had already been done, so I never went through with it.


The first comic here is based on this lame story about 2 kids from high school falling in love. I never had a proper script or idea as to the direction of the story and kept trying to rework the storyline and characters. It ended up being more of an exercise/practice than a comic worthy of anything.
The second comic page was for a 6 page anthology but the writer and I didn't see eye to eye on the story and we never made it passed this first page. I had come up with all these attractive character designs that I did on napkins and scraps of paper while at bars and restaurants, but the whole thing fell apart and was never looked back on.
I'm happy to look at these comic pages because I'm always impressed when I did something well, sometimes I can't believe I would have come up with a body posture, or a scene layout, or a facial expression. But what I don't like is how unnatural the whole feel of everything is. I did these in a program called illustrator and it shows. It's something I easily chose to stay away from in my current Akumu works. Sometimes the fact that things aren't perfect make it better. Anyways, hope you enjoyed this trip into my past. I'll have to eventually create some new stuff!