Friday, July 1, 2011

The Prologue

In 1984 while I was writing and preparing the Zooniverse series, the publishers at Reverie asked for my contribution to issue 7 of their magazine. They had already published my "Runner" piece, an experimental one pager. The timing was perfect, I had wanted to take my emerging Zooniverse style out for a spin. Also I figured it was the opportunity for some shameless self promotion. So I wrote and inked a brand new strip called.... take a deep breath.... "Sproat Fanbunder & Spleen Sphincter - The infamous repairmen!".

It was the prologue to the Zooniverse series and was only published in Australia.
I even got to do the cover and here it is, in color corrected for the first time...


The story involved two rival repairmen, their stores facing each across an empty frontier street in a desert isolated from civilization, who are visited by a Clone-a-gram. They cannot understand what the creature is saying so a botched attempt is made to find the truth. A vitamizer is used on the Clone-a-gram's head instead of a translator, leaving the message to be transfered via it's extracted spine.

The message?

"The Zooniverse is coming!". The comic ends with two rivals responses to the pronouncement. Dire warning or Joyous Proclamation?

The other announcement of the Zooniverse's imminent arrival was this one pager that appeared in Fox comics in 1984, originally published in black and white. I've colored it for your appreciation.

2 comments:

  1. Keep 'em coming, I can hardly wait for the next batch of postings.

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  2. @Marcelo Vignali There's a lot or recoloring I'm working on for the next post, slows me down considerably, but thanks for the encouragement :)

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