Early Promo Material

Back in 2000, when I was still actively working on "The Journals of Simon Pariah", trying to get it distributed by Diamond or picked up by another publisher, I took a trip to the Canadian Comic Book Expo in Toronto. The excuse for this trip was that I was going to promote my book and art to other industry pros. The main reason was that I wanted to buy scads of comics, ogle Stacy Walker and be all fanboyish over Barry Windsor Smith.
To prepare for this trip, I put together a slideshow on disk, showcasing some of my art from Simon Pariah. The pages were put together into an .exe file with Carmina Burana as background music (this was before I completely understood the danger and paranoia of distributing .exe files on disk). Following are the images that were compiled into that early promo piece.



This first image was a non-specific shot of Simon. I also designed a web banner using this image, but it never got used, and now it's lost amongst my files somewhere.



This image is from the as yet unfinished story "Angeline". At the time, I'd only just begun writing the story, but I knew that this scene would occur in a later chapter.



This page is from a story I have not written yet. It's more of a scene I'd like to see...Simon Pariah vs. a whole mess of C.H.U.D.'s.



I have no story behind this one at all; I just wanted a "Challengers of the Unknown" kind of shot to establish that the book was about more than just dark fantasy. The intent is to touch on all genres in some way, eventually.



A variation on the same image. I really do try to avoid straight on vertical compositions when I can; they're easy to draw, but not as interesting to look at in the end.
Interestingly, if this story ever gets written, I don't think Simon will be the main character. I'd like to do a number of stories in which he is only a member of the supporting cast.



A climactic image from the first Simon Pariah story, "God of the Cave". This was a very thinly veiled Conan pastiche, with the intent being that the old genre icons had played themselves out and the narrative torch was being handed to a new generation of characters.



This is a takeoff on a scene from "Anthem". I'd like to get Simon involved in this kind of dystopian story, and now that "Anthem" has passed into public domain, I may be able to do something with this. It's no secret that Ayn Rand's work has been a strong influence on me, and I would love to do a derivative work set in one of the worlds that she created.

Of course, all that assumed that I will get back to Simon Pariah someday. Right now, the site has been dormant for a couple of years. I found that I was putting a lot of time and effort into it, but getting absolutely nothing back, not even comments. People were reading, but I had no idea what they thought of any of the work, and nothing good exists in a vacuum. Maybe if I can get this web marketing thing figured out, I can finally dedicate myself to telling the stories again. It's not that I expect to get rich off the idea, but I'd like to at least know that people are paying attention.

I've been doing a lot more scans from my files, so expect a few more updates this week as soon as I get the entries written.