Mad Genius Comics

It’s been a while since I wrote a new blog post, but I’ve got the best excuse in the world: Tom Grummett and I have been working like mad dogs on New Section Zero Stuff! And you lucky, lucky people get to enjoy the results starting today!

When Tom and I brought back Section Zero, our first goal was to finish the story we’d begun all those years ago. And while that basic story remained the same, the way we needed to tell it had changed drastically. Section Zero started as an ongoing series, where storylines and sub-plots would have played out in certain ways. But now we were looking at Section Zero as more self-contained— more like a movie than a TV series— and that meant the pieces had to fit together in different ways. Better ways, I’d say. Much better.

One thing I realized very quickly was that we needed to show Tina and Sam together in their pre-Zero days. We’d already done that in a flashback near the end of issue 2, but that scene didn’t touch on some points that were now very important to establish. So Tom and I decided to jettison that flashback and insert an entirely new one.

The original flashback was only one page. The new one turned out to be six pages. But that’s not a problem with web comics, is it? One of the things I deeply love about this format…

Gotta say, it’s great to be working with Tom again. This scene has some of the best art I’ve seen from him ever, anywhere. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s some of the best work the two of us have done together, period. After this flashback is over we’ll return to posting the original Section Zero story, but what you’ll see over the next few weeks is a glimpse of What’s To Come— a hint at What We Have Planned and Where We’re Taking Things. I’m betting you’ll like what you see.

Lastly: a big shout-out to Grace Allison, who generously and beautifully colored our new flashback sequence. Grace is the only person I’d trust to color these characters other than Big Ben Dimagmaliw himself. Grace colored the Johnny Zombie Christmas story I did with David Hahn, and is currently coloring IDW’s wonderful Memorial comic, written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Rich Ellis. She’s also a damn talented artist in her own right, and will soon be far too famous and in-demand to help out on the odd (some would say very odd) Mad Genius project. But I am eternally grateful whenever she has time to lend a hand, because she always makes everyone she works with look good.