X-Ray Studios

What did Eric and I work on before Supergirl, you didn't ask. Oh... lats of stuff. One of which was the creator owned "Kid Gravity" that ran in the pages of Disney Adventures for several years.


This is just one page, and it's from many years ago. Don't judge us to harshly.

Anyway, during the time we were working for Disney Adventures, Eric and I would frequently attend conventions. The most common pahrase we heard was: "You guys kinda dropped off the map".

Yeah. That's what we did. Disney Adventures had distribution numbers of over a million, with a projected readership figure per issue that topped 5 million. You could buy it at the check out stand of almost every grocery store. And not just in the US. It was available in multiple countries, translated into multiple languages.

I think that's about as "on the face of the Earth" as you can manage. We worked for a magazine that outsold just about every comic every month combined. Kids though... they knew. They would be passing our booth, see our work, and try to stop. Just so their parent could continue dragging them, protesting, across the convention floor to go see something that had been turned into a movie.

Not that I'm bitter. I mean, ask anyone who knows me. I'm always bitter. So you can't really say it's just this one thing. Eric and I both made a decent living for years doing what was not a tremendous amount of work. And now there is an entire generation that was raised on our work.

Hard to be bitter about that, actually.

Disney released a collected volume. But it's out of print. It can be found at Amazon here.

I feel like posting something non-Supergirl related. I mean, there will be more Supergirl stuff. Probably tomorrow.

But for now... Little Gloomy.

This story is one of my favorites in regards to this era of my writing. I know it's one of my favorites because it's the only one I looked at and could bear the thought of posting. This was originally featured in Disney Adventures Magazine back in... what? 2005? 2006? Probably 2006. It was part of the Super Scary Monster Show trade paperback in 2007, published by SLG. But due to financial considerations, the collected volume does not include the color. The coloring on this peice was executed by long time collaborator Rikki Simons.


The book is available here.

The last issue of Disney Adventures is in stores right now. We have two pieces in this issue; a one page Kid Gravity story titled "Paranoia", and what was almost the first of a new series of Scrooge McDuck comics. Eric Jones, colorist Pannel Vaughn and myself have been pursuing this project for the last year or so, and luckily managed to get in one published 3 page strip before the axe fell.

This is the comic strip we created as a sample in the hopes of kick starting the project. Not my favorite bit of writing. But it served as a vehicle for the art while we found our legs with the characters.



The process behind this was a fun one for us. Eric drew each panel on an entire sheet of paper. Then I scanned in the artwork and printed it out on paper Pannel had procured that took well to water color (we had to experiment quite a bit to find the right stock), then we rescanned each fully hand colored illustration and dropped it into a page format. From there, this one page bit underwent the standard process via Illustrator and Photoshop.

I'm pleased with the end result visually. The Scrooge work disappeared with the rest of Disney Adventures, but I'm hoping we can find another outlet for this production style.

In other news: Eric discusses creating a functional world for Little Gloomy in the newest Super Scary Monster Show blog.