While I draw, I am always listening to something. Usually it's an audiobook that I've checked out from the library. Sometimes it's music. My all time favorite thing to listen to, however, is various podcasts. One that I really like is Wordballoon, which is hosted by fellow Chicagoan John Siuntres. Siuntres interviews different comic book creators - writers, artists, etc. and the show is not only incredibly entertaining, but also informative.
One night, back in 2007, I was listening to one of the many Wordballoon interviews with Brian Bendis. A question was read about breaking into the comic business and Bendis started listing off different websites that could be used to connect to people, show off work, and get jobs. One of the sites he mentioned was DigitalWebbing. I visited it and there were people advertising for artists. At this point I had already drawn Marie Curie and colored Benedict Arnold for Capstone and was working on a couple of different stories for an anthology that Len Strazewski was putting together. Still, I did have some time on my hands, so I started answering some of the ads.
One of the ads was by someone named Cherie Donovan, who lived in England and had a 6 page story she needed penciled for Orang Utan Comics. I read the script and thought it was decent enough (to be honest, I thought most of the scripts I read from people on DigitalWebbing were pretty good). Then I found out that Cherie was only 19 years-old! For someone that age, this script was phenomenal! The story consisted of secret government genetic experiments that were used to create super agents ( aren't they all?).
The story appeared in the anthology The Eleventh Hour #2. What makes this work a bit more significant is that Cherie was one of the colorists for some of Markosia's books. Because of that, when Markosia ran into scheduling problems with Heretic, I was recommended as a replacement for the penciler. I ended up drawing well over a hundred pages for Markosia, between Heretic and Kong. Those hundred plus pages changed the way I draw and made me a much better artist. Little did I know that would be the outcome of taking an hour to listen to a simple podcast.
