In 2017, my family and I moved into a new home. My favorite thing about the new location was that for the first time in my life I had a dedicated studio space.

Our home sat in the historic district of a small mill town outside of Pittsburgh, where the houses are narrow, tall, and smashed together. My studio sat perched in the attic where electric baseboard heaters held the frigid Pittsburgh winters at bay—but the summers were a different animal. The heat was sweltering, and I had to start up the window AC units hours before using the space. But I loved it.

The drawing above was the first image I made in my new spot, and it had a livliness that I’d been unable to capture in previous illustrations. Jack resembles Hunter, while the other two characters were made up on the spot and acted as stand-ins for upcoming cast members. All I knew at the time was that I wanted Jack to be the leader of a small crew.

What follows is my first attempt at the Jack Titan comic. I generally hate sketching in sketchbooks, preferring to work things out in story form. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This one doesn’t, but these are my first steps toward taking comics-making seriously.

So, there you go. The first proper Jack Titan story. I had dialogue written out, but it’s long gone and probably for the best.

The beginning sequence is a heavy-handed, clunky back story involving Jack, his wife, and their child. Then it fast-forwards to Jack (now with a tentacle hand) living life as a bounty hunter. He has a female alien partner, and they fight a gang of goons and their giant robot ball-thing I was going to name Big Bob. I’m glad I lost that script.

There’s a lot of drawing and storytelling I dislike in this piece, but some of it holds up. I love the sequence of the main goon laying in his own blood while pressing the activation switch for Big Bob, who then catapults into action. I also enjoy the early two page sequence where Jack talks with the goons (the page that ends with him flicking his smoke) and the following page with Jack striking the mohawked thug. That was fun.

However, the main point of this project was to get Jack moving, and figure out how to get better at panel sequencing, using color as a storytelling element, and word balloon placement.

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A couple of technical points. First, I drew these pages with a nib pen and ink. It was the first time I’d ever used a nib, and I really liked it. However, part of the reason I stalled out toward the end was because the work lacked a particular line quality that I felt was important to the title. I wanted chunkier, more lively strokes that you get with a brush, which was my weapon of choice prior to this project.

The image below is a pivot that would lead to Jack’s next iteration—one that proved to be a bit more expressive, and put me firmly on a path to the later, better iterations of Jack and his team.

Speaking of his team, you can see I swapped out Jack’s alien female partner for a human version. I also had plans to have them rescue a tech-genius kid who would end up building them a robot. Anyway, that never came to fruition, but I do like the piece a lot because of where it would lead me in the future.