Friday, October 23, 2009

From the Vault - Slash Shot 1988

And here I always thought that EXIT 6 was my first comic book concept. Apparently not. A look under my bed in Maine produced these pieces of art from 1988.

"Slash Shot" looks to be a nice blend of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (one of my favorite childhood concepts) and hockey (one of my favorite childhood, and adult, sports). Add in a kid who uses a yo-yo as a weapon (something I'm sure I ripped off of Battle of the Planets) and you have "Slash Shot."

I even found these story pages. Looking at them now it looks like a few neighborhood kids are taking the law into their own hands and going out at night to fight all the evil-doers out there.

Yes, it's simple, derivative, and childish, but what do you expect from a kid in the 80's?

I was also apparently into a gray wash technique at this time. It's something I'm sure I was doing to try and mimic what Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were doing in the Turtles books. I didn't know then, like I do now, that they were using duo-shade board to produce their gray tones. It's a certain kind of paper that, when used with a special chemical, produces gray tones by revealing lines or dot patterns. I'm sure I asked a teacher or someone and they told me that they were doing a gray wash. So, I broke out the gray water and went to town.

It's always funny to find old stuff like this under the bed. I really had no memory of this stuff at all and it was nice to have a friendly reminder that I did have ideas and concepts before Keith Howard and EXIT 6.

Click any of the images for a larger version.

2 comments:

rob! said...

Wow, what a find...makes we want to find really old stuff that may be sitting in a closet somewhere.

Sean Tiffany said...

I was amazed at some of the stuff I found under that bed. I have a few more pieces from way back when that I can't wait to show off. I love it because, even though the old stuff is crude, you can see the love and experimentation in every piece and see how far I've come.