Dead Projects File: MONSTER BAITERS

First page of Tim Seeley and Andrew Barr's Monster Baiters.

A long time ago I got in touch with Tim Seeley, creator of the comic Hack/Slash among others, to tell him how much I enjoyed the book and jokingly point out the similarities the first issue of the comic had with one of my self published Something-a-Go-Go comics. We had a few laughs. Eventually he got involved with a comic anthology project with Troma featuring short stories by a bunch of different artists, he asked if I'd like to be a part of that so I said sure. I did the art for a Toxic Crusaders story in that book in a totally digital style, just as an experiment to see if I could. I thought it turned out pretty good. 

Any way a short time after that Mr. Seeley asked if I'd like to collaborate on something. Since the Troma thing was kinda fun I said sure. Tim started working up a script about an island inhabited by B-movie style monsters and a sleazy director who films his movies there to save on special effects. There was some time travel involved an evil genius from the future, most of the characters had dark secrets or strange pasts and it all sounded really fun. Unfortunately due to a lack of a publisher and other projects I had on the go at the time the Monster Baiters ended up on the back burner and slowly disappeared from both our RADARs, although there was talk about selling it to a movie studio or something. 

Fortunately some of these ideas survived and made it into a recent story arc in Hack/Slash. (issues 12 to 14 of the current series) Since my local comic shop seems to only get Hack/Slash sporadically I never got to see these issues. If you are into horror flicks and comics you should be reading Hack/Slash its a great book.

What you see in this post is the extent of the work I completed for Monster Baiters. I still like most of these characters, but after all this time I don't think I'd ever want to do an entire comic in this style. The short Toxic Crusaders thing was tough and it wasn't even 10 pages long. Hopefully Mr. Seeley and I will get a chance to collaborate again one day (may be the terrifying Hack/Slash–Something-a-Go-Go crossover [which will never happen]) but until then, enjoy this peek into what could have been. Thanks again Tim for letting me show off these designs.

 

I still love this drawing of Rudy.

 

wow, seven years ago.