The Sprites of Mannu, 1989
This oddball project comes from an APA I was involved in from the late 80s into the late 90s. It was called Animanga, and the participants were budding artists and writers who were inspired by anime and manga. (In case you haven’t read my explanation elsewhere, think of an APA as the paper predecessor to social media.)
We would share our ongoing projects with each other in each issue, and at some point I got an idea that a bunch of us could participate in. One of the writers would come up a short script (any concept, any genre) and all of the artists would draw their own version of it. I thought it would be fun and interesting to see how many different directions we could take it.
A writing member named Paul Sudlow stepped up and delivered a script. I don’t remember now how many artists ran with it, but it was enough to fulfill the experiment. My version is presented here. Paul’s story sort of had a Miyazaki vibe to it, so I combined that with my roughed-up SF style. I’m guessing I drew this shortly before my professional comics career got off the ground. Any later, and I wouldn’t have had time.