Imaginary Villains!

It's probably a bit inelegant or even pointless to discuss this here, but seeing as how I'm the only fan of The Lo/Ho (see sidebar on right), one can assume that makes me one of the very few readers of The Lo/Ho, I will discuss this here. For myself. To myself (and maybe "you").



In December of 2006 I had the epiphany that I should send my comics out to see if anyone was interested in them. I basically used the weekly Lo Life comic strips as a rough outline for a larger more detailed story. I figured comic book publishers were just dying to get their hands on some adequately drawn, half-developed, comics about a skeleton.

I mailed myself a copy of everything first. I know there a few of us that believe mailing yourself material through the postal service and leaving it sealed in an envelope will hold up as copyright. I don't know if that actually holds up (although they say it does on the net...dude (that's 90's jive for the internet)).

As you might have expected, everyone was not dying to get their hands on some adequately drawn, half-developed, comics about a skeleton. And I can't say this was completely unexpected. I knew it was lazy to send a glorified outline to a publisher, but I also thought maybe it would be enough to spark some interest.

As days and weeks went by I was also feeling a sense of pre-boredom with drawing the same characters in the same world for the rest of my life (which is obviously what would happen given the impending worldwide success of The Lo Life). In fact, The Lo Life appeared to be gaining some momentum, I believe this subculture began as a reaction to the eight Lo Life comic strips.


About a month or so after sending my glorified outline to my favorite companies, Dark Horse being one of them. In January 2007 I picked up the latest issue of The Goon (a Dark Horse comic) written and illustrated by the amazing Eric Powell. It was a weird little stint of The Goon series presented by Dwight D. Albatross. These issues consisted of short stories written and illustrated by other illustrators and one brief sketch/comic by Powell.

As I was reading the issue something a bit odd happened:


So naturally I suspected Dark Horse passed my submission on to Eric Powell so that he could put a very similar scene in his next comic.

...

...and that feeling went on for another 5 years. I've felt a bit weird about Dark Horse comics since the great Lo Life submission of 2006. That is, until I started to put together the dates and take a look back at my work. What's interesting is that I've remembered this as the moment in which I stopped drawing comics for just over a three-year period. When actually it was more of the beginning. This was really the moment I decided I wouldn't try to be the next guy that draws Batman, I would be the guy that does his own thing and between January and September of 2007 I created 3 mini comics and 40 comic strips (not really an end).

As I began to piece this together for the blog I also realized that the story Powell drew was called
Peg-Leg Full of Heaven and this was part 3 (Part one was published in September of 2006, however no pirates make an appearance). So with a title like that one would certainly expect a pirate to appear at some point. Really, the only weird thing about the situation was that we were drawing nearly the same thing at the same time.

The moral of the story? Don't overlook the details! Why didn't I notice "part 3" at the time? That's just silly. I was probably feeding my own ego to suspect-but-not-really-suspect Dark Horse of stealing my idea. I ended up creating imaginary villains for myself and I'm pretty sure that's already a story!