Nothing takes me back to my early 20’s like a good ol’ Silent Hill game (to be fair they’ve all fallen off since the 3rd installment…) Even the first movie from ’06 was a pretty decent adaptation of the franchise. I’ll admit, the one thing that really spooked me to the bone was the ominous unnamed butcher with the rusted metal frame adorning his head and shoulders, referred to simply as “Pyramid Head.”
That lumbering gait, dragging that enormous cast iron meat sword behind him, slowly chasing you through unlit, labyrinthine buildings and alleyways is still the stuff of nightmares all these years later. Enjoy!
So let’s sum up the last three years. Starting in late February 2020: GalaxyCon (yay!!) Covid (boo) Unemployment (boo) Art Commissions (yay!) Mid Covid Restaurant Reopening and job promotion (yay?) Rinse, repeat for a year and a half. Various work and personal ups and downs and we arrive at summer 2022. After being burnt out by the restaurant industry and falling off on my artwork, I was approached by a couple friends in the Richmond, VA area about a new project. A comic book project!
It’s been a good decade and a half since I’ve done sequential artwork in a narrative capacity. I’d worked on a partial outline for a potential series in 2010 which, due to my work schedule and return to higher education, took a back burner. Though, taking part in larger community projects like “Inktober” over the years, I’d managed to prevent getting too rusty.
Issue #1 Cover, completed inks
My artist friend Ally Slawson approached me alongside her writer friend Joshua Eadie about a comic book project he’d conceived of several years back. The idea was for Joshua to write, I’d do the principle artwork with Ally finishing the images with color and lettering. The comic is called “Southtown” and will be set in a futurist cyber-punk world. All tech-mods, tattoos and corporate terrorism! After spending the summer meeting every few weeks, mocking up character designs and defining roll-out plans, the actual comic is starting to take shape. Several pages are already completed (pre-color) and the crew and I have set up a website (still under construction) with a Kickstarter campaign soon to follow. More (frequent!) updates as these details and dates are solidified. I’ll be dropping art teases on Instagram and Facebook as more progress is made. If all goes well enough in the coming months, we may see you at GalaxyCon 2023 in March!
Committing a design to permanent ink is one of the most stressful steps of my creative process (aside from maybe paint mixing.)
Perhaps therein lies the benefit of the digital age, the hard-lined phase of an illustration doesn’t come with the pressure of perfection when there’s an “undo” key. For me, though, I’ve always preferred the sharpness of the pen/brushstrokes. Or maybe I’ve become one of those stubborn, stuck in the old ways artists.
Regardless, these designs won’t finish themselves. More on this piece as I make more progress.
Wil Smith Illustration 