I thought it might be fun to dig through my archives and reflect on the way technology has changed since my first efforts to create computer-generated comics. When the first personal computers came out, everybody was saying they were the wave of the future. I bought a used computer and a paint program and did some of my first drawing with a mouse. I printed it on a dot matrix printer. This is the first computer-generated image of an Intrepid Force character.
Meanwhile, I was also working on a story about a time traveler. My main character lived in a dark, dystopian world like the one described in George Orwell’s 1984, but discovered he was living in a world that that been altered by time travelers who had meddled in the past. I did the first few pages on my old DOS PC and printed them on a dot matrix printer.
The art I did then was gritty and simplistic, but working within the limitations of the media also gave it a kind of style–or the beginnings of one, at least. I looked into getting a VGA card so I could work in color, but my computer wouldn’t upgrade to one. I was stuck with monochrome until I could afford a new computer.
When I was 23, I went back to college to change careers. About that time, Commodore started selling the Amiga. It offered artists the ability to do their computer graphics in color. I got a bank loan, bought an Amiga and got a pressure-sensitive pad so I could trace my work into the computer. Color laser printers were very expensive, but I found a $200 thermal wax transfer printer that would let me print my work in color. It took about 45 minutes to print one page. I remember the frustration of finding errors in my work when a page was half-printed. The color cartridges didn’t last long either. I was still working on the time travel story, and this is some of the art from those days.
I was working on a rewrite of Intrepid Force then, and I wanted to do some computer generated images of those characters. One project was to create a set of pictures of the characters. This is one of them.
The Amiga and wax transfer printer got me through graduate school, but the process was frustratingly slow, and I did a lot of screaming when I worked with it. Finally I got out of school and got a teaching job at a university. The story continues from there, so come back next week as I continue my walk down computer-generated memory lane.