World, meet LOCUSTS.
If you can’t read the lettering at this size… view the full-size version here.
Very few people have ever seen this. I did 3 installments, the third of which was never finished. These are tiny stories of super-wired teens in a NY future and their ad hoc social systems.
LOCUSTS was created in 2000; this strip is the first. I remember writing it on the back of the envelope while crying about splitting up with Milla, my ex-fiancée in London. I’d never felt so low in my life at that point; wandering around through my tears, I came to rest on a fire hydrant across the street from my pal Ethan’s place on Lafayette. Sitting and thinking about her (just like panel 1), the story started oozing out my fingertips and I had to scribble to catch up. The first strip was done a few days later. Highlights include opening Adobe Illustrator for the first time to learn-lettering-while-lettering.
What’s interesting (to me anyhow) as a artistic-historical doc is that this was my first attempt to bring comics to the computer. These panels were hand-pencilled, brush-inked as seperate panels, then scanned and “built” into this strip. The colors, I sheepishly admit, were done with the Paint Bucket tool in Photoshop. I spent the night at the office when I worked at DC Comics doing the building/coloring/lettering in the hopes that my “contact” at VICE magazine would be into my toony-techie-trippy idea.
*It was rejected by VICE a month or so later… many years before they invaded the suburbs of the midwest.
