Star Players

High on my list soon after "First Date, Last Date" was a story penned by Greg Lockard, titled "Star Players." It's a sweet story about rival soccer players who met at a summer camp.

I was thrilled when Monica Gallagher agreed to ink my pencils for the story, and Chris Beckett agreed to color it.

The down side of the whole affair was some miscommunication that led to the story not completed until 2020. But it's released as a single and as part of On the Romance Road, so now harm no foul I guess.

About this time, I also finished all my art tasks for Baby Makes Three. That too wasn't published until 2021, due to time in Matt's coloring queue. But the first half of 2018 was a productive golden moment for me. 

 

First date, last date

 

At this point in 2018, I was going gangbusters with gay romance short stories, having amassed shorties I wrote and drew ("Quickies," "I Like Mozart," "Every Journey..."), or drew from others' scripts ("Liebestraße," "Cross Check," "The Most Incredible Magic"). I intended to combine these new stories with the best of my romance shorties from past anthologies.

One story haunted me. Originally posted to the web series Young Bottoms in Love was a tattooed tale I drew, as written by another author. The story hadn't turned out the way either of us wanted it to back in 2003. Yet, I liked the vintage art.

Fifteen years later, I turned to a frequent collaborator, MJ Isola, and asked he write a new story to the original art (an exercise he'd done before at my request). Rules were simple: keep as much of the art as possible, but feel free to cut panels, re-arrange, or add up to four pages of new material to make it work.

The end result fell right in line... I think he added three pages plus two panels, and I added a splash page (thumbnail here). The original art focuses on a couple's first date; and two new end pages are a flash-forward fifteen years, revealing it had been their last first date, as they'd remained a couple since.

Wizards, Knights, Dragons

 

I don't recall the exact timing, but by the time we were in Cardiff, I was in short story mode for what was published as On the Romance Road. While there, I drew several pages of "Every Journey Begins with the First Step" which I had scripted a few weeks prior.

And, a few days prior, at Thought Bubble, Timothy Winchester had agreed to draft a script for the collection. I find him hilarious, so I was a little surprised when he came up with his wizard story. Since In the spirit of new challenges, I embraced it!

The first drawing was done in Cardiff, as was the dragon sketch, before Timothy sent me the script. The other two are in preparation to draw the story. Though I finished in 2017, the pages kept getting pushed to the bottom of Matt's coloring pile as (1) I kept sending him more projects and (2) the pages were really challenging to color... very dense art for me.

But you can read the finished story on comiXology!

 

 

Draft scripts

 Here's the start of "Every Journey..." published in On the Romance Road on comiXology. Sketches, thumbnails of the first page, and a lot of the script is there. Yes, when I write for myself, this is usually what the script looks like! Or used to, before I entered grad school and had to start adhering to some standards. Admittedly, it's much easier to edit from a Word doc or Final Draft than it is this mess!