Early Steeple work 1

The collected edition of STEEPLE issues 1-5 will be out from Dark Horse on June 09. To celebrate, here are some behind the scenes sketches from the very early development of the book. 

You can read new pages of Steeple until June 12th at Steeple.church! 

As a series, Steeple developed slowly. Initially, there was only new recruit priest Billie, no Maggie, I don't think there was much of a church of Satan. It lacked a lot of the components that made it work. Then, on an afternoon spent waiting for a friend who never arrived - months after I'd abandoned work on it - the idea for a parallel church suddenly came to me, and the comic came to life. These are the sketchbook pages from the day I created Maggie, Tom and Brian.

I had the design for Billie before I had any of the other ideas for the series. She was in my sketchbook as "cheerful lady vicar".  Penrose came pretty easy, though he originally had a moustache, until I realised he looked just like a character from Black Hammer. he started off quite skinny, before beefing up when the book was taken up by Dark Horse. When I got to Dark Horse, I knew I wanted there to be some fights.

As soon as I drew the first picture of Maggie next to Billie, at the top there, I knew they'd be friends, not enemies. That immediately deepened the series. Lower down I am still struggling with Penrose's moustache. Brian took shape quickly, I could see him in my head. I don't really know what the hearing trumpet was all about.

I wanted Maggie's hair to be very untamed, like a wave, or a cloud. It was black for a long time, then I saw a young woman with big silver hair on the street and made a mental note.

On the train home from Cambridge, I concocted Brian's weird take on lycanthropy, as seen in "The Silvery Moon". Al I knew at this early stage was, he is barely a werewolf at all.

Below are are my original notes for issue 3, where charismatic youth preachers try to create a mini rapture with wind turbines. The turbines were my girlfriend's idea, a Cornwall native, she came up with the notion of the "divine whine" on the day I restarted work on Steeple, and I went from there.

I have a huge pile  of process work from Steeple - I'll add more for patrons in the coming weeks.