IMAGE FANTOME: BUILT ON SHIFTING SANDS

This past Christmas I was lucky enough to win a random blog draw from the mighty Mike Hawthorne, wherein Mike would do a commission of my choice. Since I already had an Audrey Hepburn drawing from Mike, I opted for Shade the Changing Man. Mike posted it here, and I am not posting it below:

Mike is a truly awesome artist who should be much more famous in comics than he is. At Oni, he drew the fantastic romantic comedy Three Days In Europe and also his own book, Hysteria, which later had a home at Image. I even wrote the intro to the Queen & Country volume he drew. He's a creator you should definitely support. You always know he's going to bring his best work. He's currently drawing some Conan comics for Dark Horse.

I actually worked on a reboot of Shade the Changing Man a few years back, and I got through one very rough draft of a story outline with Bob Schreck and Brandon Montclare before word came down from on high that old Vertigo characters were off limits. At different times, both Duncan Rouleau and Christopher Mitten had expressed interest in being involved as an artist. As I love the old Vertigo series that Peter Milligan wrote, I chose not to step on that or mess around with his characters, but instead tried to create a whole new Meta where the story ideas embodied by the character's different versions collided in a fractured realm of crazy. I bit off more than I could chew in the first draft, so maybe it was for the best that it stopped there. Plus, Milligan recently brought Shade back in Hellblazer, and it's been fantastic.

Now, how do I convince Mike's Comic Twart fellows to do a Shade the Changing Man week?

Current Soundtrack: The Raveonettes, "Forget That You're Young;" The Go! Team, Rolling Blackouts