Despite all the drawings you see on this blog my career is really as a graphic designer and art director. I work on my own comic in my free time as well as a lot of other illustrated odds and ends but despite having a degree in Illustration from Syracuse University I haven’t really been pursuing that sort of work for many years now.

Well, there’s something to be said for doing your own thing really well and having paid work find their way to you. My work on Nathan Sorry has landed me two big illustration jobs this year. The first, an animation project, has not launched yet so I’ll wait until then to talk about it. The second just hit the stands last week: my first illustration work for a major print publication, Charlotte Magazine.

The editors at Charlotte Magazine approached me with an idea to illustrate an entire article in the form of a comic book. They had never done anything remotely like this before and even though I’ve been working on my own graphic novel for a couple of years now I hadn’t really worked with another writer on anything like this either. The writer of the piece, Jeremy Markovich, had interviewed some people in town about the state of the local sports franchises and the colorful nature of these characters he spoke to seemed to lend itself to this sort of treatment. After discussing how best to handle the story in a fun way while still being journalistic, we all decided to treat the content of the interviews straight but to set the words amidst the visuals of undead, zombie sports fans slowly taking over the city.

It was a real blast to work on this and you can read it all in its entirety here -  granted, I think it’s a little more effective on the page where it’s not chopped up into separate panels. At some point in the near future I’ll post it online here.

Also, Jeremy wrote up a really nice piece about the process of making the comic over on his blog. There’s some sketches and stuff from the early stages of some pages.