Along with Rawhead Rex, Michael Zulli and I invested ourselves in another project around 1990-92, working in close collaboration with Maine novelist and good friend Rick Hautala.
You may rightfully ask, “why work on two projects of such size, guys?” Freelancing is a constant juggling act, and unless you’re a contracted work-for-hire freelancer, one is always working (most often for free, aka ’spec’) on more than one project in hopes at least one project will find a home that pays and publishes.
Best case scenario: one project sells and you pour yourself into it. Worse best case scenario: everything sells and you have to figure out how in hell to do it all. Worst worse case scenario: nothing sells. Worst worst worse case scenario: you think you sold something only to watch it dissolve after doing a lot of work on it, thinking it had a home.
As it turned out, as the Rawhead Rex project went south, it began to look like we did have a home for the Little Brothers — but I’m getting ahead of the story here.
This SpiderBaby Sketchbook sneak peek behind the scenes of that project and proposal will cull images from my personal sketchbooks and the bound proposal Rick, Michael and I offered to Dark Horse Comics (in 1991) and, after a very fruitless dance with Dark Horse, to Vertigo (in 1992).
A little background: Little Brothers was Rick Hautala’s fourth novel, first published by Zebra Books in 1988 (paperback cover at left).
It was my immediate favorite of Rick’s novels to date, and between face-to-face blathering over beers at Necon and ongoing phone conversations, I encouraged (well, bullied) Rick to continue writing about the Untcigahunk — the ‘little brothers’ introduced in the novel — as they seemed to have almost endless story possibilities.
Rick indeed did follow up, writing four self-contained but interlocking short stories in remarkably quick order. I loved ‘em, and passed these on to Michael, who also enjoyed them.
I powwowed with Rick (including a sunny outdoor picnic in Brattleboro, VT and one trip I took up to Rick’s home in Maine) and Michael and I began swapping sketches and drawings back-and-forth. We also deliberated over which of the four stories to begin with, each of us adapting our personal favorite of the quartet.
The three of us settled on proposing a four-issue comics miniseries, adapting each of the four stories into 28-page comic narratives. To that end, Michael and I did full, comprehensive roughs for two of the stories/issues (more on that later) and Michael even completed a gorgeous oil painting cover proposal. I tell you, it was lovely stuff.
This first batch of sketches date from 1990, and appear to have been done around the same time Michael Zulli and I were still hard at work on Rawhead Rex. These are from the same sketchbook from which I scanned the early Rawhead Rex designs I posted a few weeks back.
My first concepts, though true to the descriptions in Rick’s novel, were a bit too inhuman.
Rick wanted a closer echo of true Maine Native-American features in their faces, while I was initially intent on building (per usual) these critters from the inside-out, form following function, given their subterranean habitat and tunneling abilities.
I reckon I was also a wee bit too in love with those Gorgo ears in the first volley of drawings.
To be continued…
Steve!…..damn. If my scanner wasn’t pafitizz at the moment I’d love to send you some stuff from my old tomes…..Again, the lil bro’s coulda shoulda if this were a better world eh?
Z.
Michael, we should put a book together of our art for these two projects. It would be a fun little tome, full of piss, vinegar and ugly bogies.
Tom Crouss still has our RAWHEAD stuff, and I believe he ended up with the “Birch Canoe” oil painting, too, didn’t he?
I posted a short appreciation of the Zulli sketchbook that Tundra published back in 1991 a while back, which included a few images for this project (back when he was hopeful it would be out that year…), and one of them was the one I liked enough to scan for the review.
I’m not familiar with the original stories, but that stuff looks pretty cool. The close-up seems a bit close to your version of Kirby’s Etrigan, but evolving away from it.
Michael’s sketchbook was my all-time favorite of the Tundra sketchbook series. Great writeup, Bob, and thanks for providing something I can link to so folks can see a sample of Michael’s Little Bros sketches.
I’ll be telling more about Rick’s narratives in the coming posts, including links. Enjoy.
That’s a shame the Little Brothers series never saw publication.
Steve…..after all these years I’ve got no idea where the half finished,( and it was.) painting ended up at. And just for the record, there was and has been nobody as much shear fun to work with than steve…..the ideas just buzzed all over the place.
Z.
I have such great memories of working up this proposal with you guys, and the fact that it never happened (yet! ) is one of the biggest regrets of my career …
Thank you for posting this stuff (and what’s forthcoming). It’s great people get to see what might have been …
Rick
–>> ..in their own twisted little way ..
their kinda cute,
Then again i just got up at the crack of noon and the crust is still permeating and obstructing my already fuzzy vision.
>v<
It’s interesting to glean information about the novel just from this blog entry about it. That could be a story all itself – rebuilding events from a sketch diary and the first draft of an adaptation. It’s got a Pickman’s Model kind of vibe.