I’m Charlie James, and I like comics. In college, I wrote a short story called The Sin Police as an assignment for a fiction writing class I was in just for grins. It was a big hit with the professor and the other students, and I was even asked to read it at a Christmas party at the prof’s house. With the inflated ego I received from that experience, I decided to turn the story into a comic for my Cartooning/Illustration class. I got a pretty decent start on it before the end of the semester, but then shelved it for awhile as other classes and part-time jobs took priority. After graduation, I started up again, but was unhappy with some of my previous art, so I started re-drawing (and re-writing) those pages. Then I thought, “Screw this–start over from the beginning, and this time write a real script instead of translating the story.” So that’s what I did, once again working on it only when other priorities left time for it.  Fast-forward almost 10 years. Here I am, still with a few pages of art that I keep going back and re-working because my preferred techniques change or because the dialogue no longer sounds good to me or whatever. You see the problem.

A wise man once said, “Finish the damn comic.” He was actually talking to somebody else, but it seemed like the advice could be applied to my situation as well. So I did. The style, if you want to call it that, is rough and inconsistent. The medium changes from ink to pencil in just the first few pages, and sometimes within one single page. I’ve resigned myself to that. If I keep worrying about going back to change old stuff in order to keep it consistent with my current leanings, it’ll never get finished. And if I don’t change my techniques with my interests, it’ll become a chore and I’ll never finish it. Since finishing is the goal…

Anyhow, I’m sure you’ve lost interest in my origin story by now, but for those of you that are still reading (Hi Mom!), here are a few more tidbits. The Grandpa Sex Machine character started out as a silly sketch on a plane ride to Chicago. I think I was trying to shock the flight attendant. My brother-in-law Tim saw the sketch and told me I should make more stuff with the old guy.

And finally, the Chrome Dome logo evolved from a series of cast aluminum sculptures I did in college, back when I had access to a foundry. You can check out a bit of that over on my deviantArt page.

Thanks to my family and friends for all the support, and thanks to Nate Piekos over at Blambot Fonts for all the totally sweet and awesome comic book fonts.