Jack Titan, Version 5
2021
Now that I was feeling more comfortable working 100% digitally, I needed a project. But life was very different and very busy in new ways, so I went back to an old friend.
I revisited the Jack Titan story I’d started right before my family’s life changed, and I got to work revisiting it. Because I had several pages already working well, I started there. I dropped in the artwork I’d drawn by hand almost a year before, and drew right overtop of it in Procreate on a new layer. Simple as that. You can compare the pages below with those found in Jack Titan version 4 to see for yourself. Kinda neat, if you’re so inclined.
I don’t usually do character sheets, but the set below was a way for me to get a good feel for the digital tools I was using and how they’d marry up with Jack and his crew. I also created the big bad for the series—a dark wizard-like fella called “X” (although, named “Andronicus” on my sheet). Plus, another robot bounty hunter. I love those guys. Lastly, Sushi Master Mitsuhiro makes an appearance, all the way from the Hunter work, if you checked that out.
These pages were so much fun, and I improved them over the originals, even if much of the opening six pages or so are direct lifts from that work. There’s energy crackling off this work that’s exciting to me even now.
I love this version of Jack, and I think it’d make a spectacular series. I even worked up some manga-like versions of the pages for good measure. There was a time when I was thinking about pitching it as a series of digest-size volumes, Japanese-style. Who knows. But these pages look great in black and white, too. Plus, finally getting to be able to work with zips? So amazing.
As usual, life intervenes. At this point, my wife was healing, she was working hard in physical therapy, and I’d started a new job as an Art Director at a new agency. Life was good. However, it was time for us to move out of my in-laws’ house and into our own.
This would lead to the longest period of non-drawing of my life: almost two years. It seems unthinkable now, but that period was necessary. New job. New home. A new life to make sure I was 100% present for.
Did I miss drawing? Sure, here and there. But I was content in ways I never anticipated, and I had my family back in our own home, with our own lives.
What’s better than that?