A Giant Search; the beginnings of the first AA comic, part two

10-27-2014
I had been working for Harmony for about one or two years, I guess, when, through a mutual friend I came into contact with Bert Wibo. Bert was the editor in chief of Hollands most prominent SM magazine: Massad. We met somewhere in the center of Amsterdam, in the summer, at a sidewalk cafe. I had brought some issues from Harmony with me, to show him some of my work in there. But before I had a chance to show him something, he told me flat out: "Yes," he told me: "yes, we would be interested in your work for the magazine". And thus a co-operation was started that would last for more then a quarter of a century.

It was Bert's idea to start a comic: he thought that would fit in well within the pages of Massad.Now, this meant that for the first time in my life, I had to not only start one, but finish it too. This is the my first published comic page ever.

And boy, did this became a struggle! I just made the story up as I went along, and it kept dragging its self along, seemingly without end, issue after issue. In the end, it became fifty five pages long, and I was so glad I had finished it, I told Bert that from then on, I only wanted to do short, six page comics. And so I did, for a while. For those, I developed a style in pen and ink, with dots and stripes, which made it possible to suggest grey's, and gave me a way to render my work in a more subtle way.

But here's the thing: after a while, doing these short comics didn't satisfy me anymore, and I wanted to tell a larger story again. To cut a long story short, I have been going back and forth for ever since then.

In the mean time, I kept doing single drawings. I kept working for Harmony, and also, I had some albums published with single pages. And then one day, another publisher, friend of Bert offered me the chance to publish my first comic book.

This became Caldera, and sadly it was to be my last one too, up until these day.

All the material here can be found on the site, as part of several comic stories, long or short. Some of them are also available as E-books in our shop.
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