William : Keeper Of The Cosmic All No.1

Here's the very first episode of 'William,' along with a rough sketch of the first panels and an abandoned finished version of them. Also shown here are some early concept drawings I did of our protagonist. You can see from these early drawings I was drawing him with brown hair, which I later changed to blond. The style that I drew William in was a continuation of a character of myself I had been doing in High School. I had first been influenced to draw his head in that shape from some graffitti drawings I saw painted large across the top wall of one of my High School classes. I thought the style was very cool and sort of appropriated it for myself. I wonder sometimes if I'd never seen those drawings how differently my art my have looked.

As for the finished Episode 1 presented here; I won't be doing much playing around with the original art on the remaining episodes posted, but I felt compelled to go into this first episode a bit. Some of the art was very crude (and still is!) and the page itself wasn't in the greatest condition. I went in and cleaned up most of it, getting rid of lots of purple pencil marks, especially when it was making some of the words hard to read. I also did a bit of redrawing in a few panels. Not drawing the new stuff as I would today, though...just cleaning up and keeping in the style of the original art.