Ziks

Ziks 1
Ink and Letratone on illustration board.

While I also spent some time in Film and Video, I found that comics were better suited to realising my vision. The rest of my time in art school was devoted to working on three stories: "Ziks", "Bay Woonda" and "The Hellfire Projegt". Working on each in parallel. I think I completed the first two while in art school, and the third some time after. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "Wow! You must have been the coolest college kid ever!" I'll just show excerpts rather than bore you with the whole thing (I don't have all the original artwork anymore anyway). While I thought my artwork progressed quite nicely over the course of art school, the real stumbling block was the story. This has proven to be an abiding problem. I wanted to illustrate my own stories, because I had stories in mind, in a manner of speaking. Unfortunately they kept coming out crap. So I won't subject you to the text of these stories. While my human figures weren't great, I figured this would sort itself out naturally in time, so I wasn't too worried about it. 

During the course of art school we "published" a few copies of two issues of a comic book with contributions from each of us. The prime mover in this was Barney.

Letratone was how grey tones in comics were created before there were computers, since printing a grey tone in those days wasn't just a matter of scanning an image. Remember this was the early Eighties. Computers had been invented but weren't good for much of anything yet. Letratone was a clear plastic adhesive sheet that had tiny black dots printed on it (later there was Letracopy that allowed you to photocopy onto the blank sheet). The sheets were laid over the image and you cut away the sheet from everything you didn't want to be grey, using a designer's knife or scalpel. You could also scratch into the sheets with the curved blade of a scalpel for some fancy shading effects. Unfortunately Letratone can tend to shrink a little over time. The illustration board has also warped over time, making scanning this work difficult in places.



Ziks 2
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.

Ziks was conscripted out of high school to fight in the space war.



Ziks 3
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 4
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 5
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 6
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 7
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.

At this point I started using a brush for much of my linework instead of a technical pen.



Ziks 8
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 9
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.


Ziks 10
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 11
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.



Ziks 12
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.

Ziks and the other surviving spaceships fire their missiles into the refinery towers which explode in a blinding flash. Unfortunately, Ziks' ship collides with a piece of debris and crashes there behind enemy lines. For a time he evades the enemy, but is eventually captured. They have a machine that can extract all the memories from a brain, and use it to discover everything Ziks knows. Of most interest to them is the location of Ziks' home world which is "on the run" from them. The only way to avoid such extraction is to commit suicide prior to capture. But Ziks does not do this. After extraction, the enemy teleports Ziks outside their spaceship and he plummets to the planet's surface, to his death.

It is the practice of the military of Ziks' homeworld to implant disinformation in the minds of its pilots before a mission, but Ziks was not aware of that. The enemy were however.



Ziks 13
Black ink and Letratone on illustration board.

That is all I will show from the Ziks strip. I only revisited the Ziks idea a couple of times later in life.



Ziks 14
Pencil and some ink on photocopy paper.

The image above was created not long after finishing the Ziks strip (still pre Morgan period). Not sure what it depicts. I think it is something along the lines of Ziks reincarnated as a plant, such as a water lily.



Ziks 15
Black ink and colour pencil on A3 photocopy paper.

This image of Ziks is from a much later period than Ziks 14 (the Post-Newanda period). After Ziks crashed behind enemy lines (see Ziks 12) he evaded capture for a time. Here it appears he's crashed another ship, this time on a desolate asteroid. In the distance, an enemy battleship approaches. Ziks contemplates committing suicide to avoid the enemy taking possession of what is in this mind. His body is enveloped in a force field to protect him from the vacuum.



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