After finishing my longest comic project to date in Third Wheel, I was ready for something a little less ambitious, and lucky for me, one of my friends once again decided to write a Reckless Life script completely unsolicited. This time, Matt Shepherd dropped a zombie story in my lap. It was just a few years since the Walking Dead comic debuted, and well before the TV show, so there wasn’t yet the zombie fatigue that followed. I don’t think I would have done a horror-adjacent RL story on my own, but there was a lot to like in Matt’s script, so I figured, “Why not?”
I took the excuse to throw the playbook out and try some new things. The result is that Charity Begins in Hell features a lot of experimentation, some more successful than others.
Probably the biggest change I made for CBiH was the page format. I went from a standard 2:3 portrait to a 6:5 landscape with about half the number of panels per page. The reason for this is that I was VERY into the early days of mobile comics at that point and was working with a start-up called Clickwheel that was putting comics on iPod videos. Depending on how old you are, you may need to Google what that even is. Regardless, given it wasn't my script and as a result had no intention of printing, it seemed like a good idea to mess with my format. It turned out this removed a lot of the design elements of a comics page that I love, and ended up reformatting the whole thing into the same digest size I used on Third Wheel. The result is a lot of two-page spreads, which ironically make this story harder to read on mobile so I have reverted to the orginal landscape format here.
I can tell this story isn’t mine more than Broken Record. Locke is extra cynical and a bit more mean-spirited than I wrote him. I do love that Matt added some mythos to Old Vegas and injected a little bit of that “Gotham is as much a character as Batman” sort of thing. There is that and many other things to love ahead. “HYPOTHALAMUS…”