Hard Luck City is a seemingly ill-fated project I first created way back in 1993. Every so often, I will dust it off and fiddle around with it, but nothing much ever culminates. Maybe someday?!
This time I did a simple page summarising some of the basic themes. For fun, mostly. Who knows. I guess the pinnacle of the idea was getting Gene Colan to draw one of the demonic characters back in 2006 (see below!), for the cover art of a comics anthology project (with Paul Gravett), which would have featured HLC amongst other things.
As this image might suggest… yes, Deacon is meant to resemble David Bowie. I guess Labyrinth was something of an influence on this idea. What would I do with this rough idea of Bowie, various monsters and a young girl? Of course—I fancied it ought to be more gothic, for one thing. And that Bowie should have his real hair long, not a Tina Turner fright wig!
Anyhow, here’s Mr Colan’s version of one of the HLC demons…
Maybe I’ll write more about the various iterations of this project sometime—and include some of the art from these abortive tries.
With it’s bold use of blacks, the balance of the four panels, the addition of red and the stylized lettering I think that this is my favorite example of a sequential page that I’ve seen from you so far.
I’m going to be a little hypocritical here: You should your projects! Have faith in yourself and your work. That said, I want to see more of the above! (The Gene Colan art is pretty good, too – I believe he was quite popular!!)
The promo looks good and I would like to see more! Is Hard Luck City itself in Limbo, home to Sapphire, conceptual or something else entirely?