Behind The Scenes - The Suicide Girls Comic

In 2012 I worked on 4 issues of the Suicide Girls comic book, published by IDW under license from Suicide Girls, the “alternative” softcore erotica website. I had been doing some work for SG on the website, providing some illustrations and logo and t-shirt designs, and I was friendly with the owner. She asked if I would be interested in drawing a comic book. Truthfully, I wasn’t, and I had a lot of work already, so I declined to draw the interiors but I agreed to do covers.

A while later, she contacted me again and said that she was really unhappy with how the comic was progressing and was imploring me to help out. She didn’t like the script or the artwork, and wanted to know if there was anything I could do to fix it. She said that she was feeling like cancelling the entire project. I felt bad for her and agreed to act as an inker/finisher over the current artist’s pencils. Below are some of the before-and-afters of the first issue:

As you can see, I put a lot of myself into it. Maybe too much, as it led to a lot of tension between me and the penciller, who felt that I was being disrespectful to his work by changing so much of it. I didn’t really mean any disrespect, I just think that maybe he wasn’t the right artist for the job, but I also admit I have a pathological urge to try and correct artwork that I feel could be better. I redesigned all the characters and did a lot of work making the storytelling stronger.

Eventually the penciller quit, as tensions between us escalated and while I was hoping my revisions would inspire him to bring more to it, it had the opposite effect and he put even less in (understandable, particularly because the pay wasn’t great). We were so behind schedule and everyone was miserable so I don’t blame him for bailing. I ended up drawing issue 4 solo, in about 2 weeks. Most of it wasn’t great but I did find this sequence which I liked:

I actually improvised this sequence, it was not in the script - this was the climactic confrontation between the villain and the main character and as written she just kind of came in and killed him after some dialogue. It was very flat and I felt like it needed to be much more dramatic and exciting so I added all of the action beats here.

Make no mistake - THIS IS A BAD COMIC. I do not suggest anyone seek it out, even for completionists. I just found these looking through old files and thought that it might be interesting for some to see how making a comic does not always go smoothly.