Unmade, Unseen: More What Might Have Been

Back in the day, Sarah was planning an Action Girl Queen-Sized Special, which would have been a co-ed giant-sized one-shot, kind of like an old mainstream Annual. 

It looked like it was definitely going to happen, even though it was always something that was on the back burner. We already had some contributors lined up and I was going to do a One Punch Goldberg story set in the Kid Blastoff universe. If I remember correctly David Mazzucchelli was going to let Sarah reprint one of his short Kodansha comics. I have xerox copies of the story in my art file. 

The above image is a page featuring Action Girl and Elizabeth Watasin's Flying Girl, drawn by Stuart Immonen. If I remember correctly (you'll read that phrase a lot in these flashback posts) this wasn't done expressly for the Special. Stuart had just done a page with the characters and sent it to Sarah. I believe Stuart was asked to either expand on this or do whatever he wanted, either way I am pretty sure he was on board to contribute, possibly along with Kathryn Immonen. 

The Queen-Size Special obviously never happened, unfortunately. It was work enough for Sarah to put together the regular Action Girl series, which had been stagnating in sales and taking longer to assemble owing to many contributors moving on to their own projects which kept them from sending in new stories. Some contributors just drifted away, and one disappeared entirely, we still have her one-page original in the files after Sarah tried -- on more than one occasion -- to track her down. 

AGC ran into the usual problems facing small press anthologies (especially as it wasn't a paying gig for contributors, save for Sarah eventually getting the cover artists paid a small fee) and  with a few other besides because of it's statement of purpose. Still, 19 issues is a really nice run, especially while Sarah was also working on a number of other things. 

It's a shame the Special couldn't have made it into print, I don't think there was any finished material left in the lurch. There was never a starting line pistol shot that sent contributors off and running to their drawings tables, if you get me. In the end it was just too much to add to an already-busy schedule, and there were a lot of the logistical obstacles that the regular series faced, only involving even more people, many of whom were as busy if not busier than we were. 

Some years afterward we finished and ran the One Punch Goldberg comic in Biff-Bam-Pow. Which, as you can see by what I wrote on the convention sketch below, was also a project that had a troubled history. Like a lot of small press comics (especially, at the time all-ages small press comics), it just felt like it never came out.

2006 feels like fifty years ago.