Sunday Comics, Day 2. Bronx Angel: Born Leader (Page 1)

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Here's page 1.  Before we start talking about it,let me just tell you that you'll need to click on the caption to see the page at full size.  For whatever reason, clicking on the picture enables some kind of shrink-to-fit feature that I can't figure out how to turn off.

At any rate, I like this page because it's the first page of my first comic project that actually saw the light of day.  But there're also a few things to not like about it.  For one thing, being a typical small presser, I outsourced the art to an artist from the Philippines named Randy Valiente, and while I like Randy's work--and I liked it at the time--the fact is that I was looking to tell a story about a kid from the wrong side of the tracks in the Bronx whereas Randy read the script and saw the origin story of Captain America.  

Now, collaboration and collaborative creation are fine and all, but this is a change that, in retrospect, I shouldn't have let fly.  The problem was that when Randy sent the pages to me, they were already inked, and at the time I didn't quite know what to do about it.  Were I to do this again, I'd probably handle the issue differently, but as it is, I think some of the message of the story gets lost a little later on because the racial issues don't come through in the actual sequential pages the way that they were meant to in the original script.  It's too late to do anything about it now, but my concept--of a half-black, half-Latino kid in the Bronx searching for his identity after leaving the Marine Corps--got a little mangled, right here on Page 1.

On another topic... I was thinking of pushing this up to a two-page-per-week schedule.  Anybody interested in that?  I'm gonna assume that silence means no, so if you actually want to see two pages a week, you'd better leave a comment belo.