Part VI: Almost Professional
2007-2010

2007 was the time when Catomix's focus began to sharpen. In late January, the long-in-development series Urgent Transformation Crisis suddenly lurched closer to cohesiveness when I thought up a pair of kids who used magic to change themselves into were-creatures. The kids, mere one-issue guest characters, had a dychotomy that I instantly fell in love with: the brother loved his transformation, while the sister hated it. This pairing would give me all the material I needed to show the good and bad sides to UTC's premise of forced mutation. I could use them to voice the enthusiasm of one who wanted to become something different, and the concern of someone who didn't want to lose their identity.

At last, Urgent Transformation Crisis had interesting central characters with a lot of potential. I abandoned the scripts I had written and other characters I had been working with, including the stars of issue 0, and built an entirely new world around this brother and sister pair. Deciding the series would work better as a comedy webcomic than as the dramatic single-issue format it had previously been, I drew some test strips out of continuity order that helped me hash out the main points of the story: Cass and Flint, the sister and brother, are transformed into a goat and a squirrel by a teenage mad scientist. Hilarity ensues.

I picked key parts of the narrative to write and draw first, expecting to shape a basic but stable skeleton story I could then develop with connecting strips. It wasn't the most tidy way to start writing a series, but it kept me devoted to the project, allowing me to skip right to making the fun parts.

THE CATOMIX VAULT Click to read the issue.

With a healthy buffer of comic strips prepared, I launched Urgent Transformation Crisis in August 2007. The series garnered a modest number of readers in the first month, with highly favorable reviews. This was attributed in part to the comic's sneak previews I had posted on my deviantArt gallery, as well as carryover readers from Unfamiliar Reflection, which had completed its on-line re-release the week before UTC began. For the first time I was marketing a comic in several spots on the internet, which allowed readers to offer feedback as each strip was posted, and to share strips easily with others.

2007 ended with the release of The Crimson Christian vs The Little Blue Super Jew: A Very Crimson Christmas, the special that had been delayed the previous year. Matt and I attended launch day at our local comic shop, which had been selling copies of our comics since Unfamiliar Reflection in 2001. We sold each copy with a preview of the next special, set for an Easter launch date, but for various reasons Matt, Dave and I were unable to cobble the book together, and the project remains unfinished, with the hope that it will resume again some day.

2008 began with the rising success of Urgent Transformation Crisis, which was retitled to UTC due to simplicity's sake, and my growing dissatisfaction with the name. The comic suffered in the summer, as I worked to complete my master's degree at college, but in its wake another brand new story was taking shape.

That summer, as part of a sequential art class, I began a new series called Simon Scout in the Fifth Dimension. This comic was conceived as an homage to everything that embodied retro/vintage science fiction, with a central time-travel element. I had for years longed to write a series about time travel, but had never been sure about exactly how to approach it. I drew inspiration from an interesting time-bending book called Einstein's Dreams, written by Alan Lightman, which featured vignettes about different universes where time behaved differently.

THE CATOMIX VAULT Click to read the issue.

Simon Scout is swept into a strange dimension that transcends time and space. Each issue he would come to find himself on a different planet in a different time, where he would face a strange and possibly dangerous challenge having to do with an odd behavior of time. In the first issue he came upon a planet forced into a perpetual stone age by a zealot who thought that his civilization was too dangerous as an evolved species. Thanks to Simon's intervention, the clock is set to fast-forward, allowing the planet's population to regain its modern-day way of life.

The first issue was completed in October 2008, after which I hastily attempted to continue UTC's stalled storyline.

That December, however, my former creative partner Josh approached me once again about working on Fenix Gear. We had agreed earlier that year to help each other on our respective comics. Josh had colored all of that year's UTC strips, and in return, I would ink the next issue of his book. The project was a new experience for me, as I had to create a more professional inking technique while adapting to the penciler's totally different art style.

The rest of 2008 and 2009 passed quickly. Although I was still working with comics, the nature of the work had changed. I was inking pages in someone else's art style, in a fully digital inking program I had little experience in. Life's many responsibilities left me with little free time, and even less energy. By the end of 2009, however, I had found time to complete UTC's first story arc. The inks on the issue of Fenix Gear were completed early in 2010.

With fewer jobs on my plate, I set my sights on a new story for Simon Scout. I had brainstormed an adventurous, 22-page adventure told mostly through detailed visuals, purposefully simplifying the plot and reducing the dialogue which many had said were problems with issue 1. Unfortunately an old, all-too-familiar bout of artist's block set in over the summer just as I began the pencils on this issue. Things weren't geling the way they should, and I postponed work on the issue until I could muster enough confidence to work on the project.

The crews of the Enterprise and Defiant meet Emri Arrojado in STTNG #88, an issue commemorating the 20th anniversary of Catomix. Visual references to nearly every Catomix series appear in the void of collapsing realities. Click to enlarge.

Aching to get even the simplest comic finished in short order, I revived my old Star Trek: The Next Generation series. This comic had long since been removed from public viewing. Issues 29 and onward were never mass-produced. While I had been expanding my horizons and improving my art with Unfamilar Reflection, Seven to Seven, UTC and Simon Scout, STTNG was still being made on short notice and in lousy quality. For a decade it had simply been a means of letting off artistic steam. I didn't worry about quality in the writing or the art. I didn't have to think too hard about plot or characterization, since I had extreme familiarity with the concepts and characters. For six issues in 2009/2010, I simply enjoyed the activity of doodling and playing in the universe I used to inhabit when I was eight years old. It was an attempt to remember my roots, and it helped me feel like I was completing something, even if it was a bunch of stories no one would ever read. The series reached issue 88 on the company's 20th anniversary in August of 2010, and then went back on hiatus so that I could resume work on Simon Scout.

Also at a point in 2010 I decided it was finally time to take my work to the next level. Over the course of the year, I assembled UTC's 84 online pages into a graphic novel to be printed by the web-based print-on-demand service ComixPress. In some kind of universally coincidental poetic fashion, the first copy of the book came in the mail on Christmas Eve.

Holding the volume titled UTC: Changing Times at Attic High in my hands can easily be described as one of the highlights of my life as an amateur comic creator. Twenty years separated from a life of drawing on notebook paper with crayons, I had self-published a 94-page trade paperback in full color. It had taken years of art lessons and the advancement of the internet and print-on-demand services to do it, but it happened at last.

And the story is far from over. Looking ahead to 2011 there are several noteworthy projects in development, including further issues of UTC and Simon Scout. Catomix is sure to experience as many changes in the next two decades has it has in the past two, and I look forward to the new and exciting places my comics will travel. I will continue to hold onto whatever silly childish motivations got me started down this road in the first place, because they have never steered me wrong yet.

Coming up next: Anything that can be imagined.

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