Where to begin here. Its kind of impossible for me to imagine a world in which I DIDN’T see The Filth and the Fury at just the right time in my life. Let’s watch shall we.

The style, the message, the energy. All of these hit me like a freight train in my early 20s. The Sex Pistols music itself, I enjoy it in fits and spurts. But the whole punk rock mindset. The “us vs. them” mentality, the “we are going to make our own world and fuck what’s been offered to us”. This is exactly what I needed as an angry young man. And as an artist, the way in which this whole documentary is cobbled together from scraps and ephemera. After seeing this documentary I knew what I had to do with my life.

Jam in the Band is often hard to define. Some people call it a rock and roll fantasy. It’s hard for me not to think of this old sketch when people say that.

Or they talk about the video game stylization. Maybe they’re mistaking me for Bryan O’Malley. Not that I would knock Scott Pilgrim. I think Bryan and I are pulling from the same bag of influences. But ended up going in slightly different directions.

I feel like Jam in the Band might be Scott Pilgrim if you made Envy Adams the main character. But in my mind Jam in the Band has always been a romance comic. A more adult, more realistic romance comic. A romance comic for people in their jaded late 20’s. With some punk rock elements thrown in. So really it’s just Love and Rockets.

Corbin’s status as the drunken lesbian who is constantly sabotaging her own love life seals the deal.

The first of MANY dropped threads in this story. What seems like a throw away line about Tiara doing what Bianca tells her to, initially had far more meaning.

In earlier drafts of the script for Jam in the Band, I had planned on writing more to the backstory of Pitch Girl’s formation. Details about Tiara being the youngest and most naive member of the band, who had basically been tricked by the scheming Bianca into joining Pitch Girl. At some point I realized this was over explaining things that didn’t need to be explained. Later there will be a line about Tiara’s mother, this is also related to said dropped backstory. Having left this flashback out, I hardly feel its absence. How do you the readers the feel? Should I have included more about the early days of Pitch Girl? Maybe I should write it into the third volume.

On a final note. Before I had the title Jam in the Band, I wrote the script under the name They Don’t Love You Like I Love You. This is from a time when I though there would be more of an unrequited romance between Bianca and Nathan. It is also obviously a line from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song Maps. Let’s all watch that now shall we.

Did you know I have never been to a strip club. It’s a fact. It’s like too overt, the whole giving girls money to pay attention to you thing. Where’s the challenge in that?

I did however vastly enjoy the film Live Nude Girls Unite! Which is a documentary that follows Julia Query, lesbian/stand-up comedian/peepshow-stripper, and daughter of a feminist activist, on her raucous journey to help organize the only union of strippers in the United States

Raucous, sexy gals taking charge. Clearly, this falls under several of my interest categories. Also, I returned this tape late to the video store I rented this movie from. So I had a charge for it on my account. Which basically made the clerks think I had been renting porn. Which is another thing I have actually never done.

So another portrait of failure here. But with a slightly different twist. I always get bummed out at pet stores. I always feel bad for the little animals so desperate for attention.

That being said. The drawing of the cat here is an homage to this comic by Hellen Jo. Seriously, every time I have to draw a cat, I look at this comic.

Hellen is easily one of my favorite artist today, and has been for as long as I can remember. Check out her website and go out and buy her books. You won’t be disappointed.

I hope people catch the boom mic in frame joke in the first panel. A nod perhaps to the film making in Dolomite.

But for me, the real joke is the bears with sunglasses in the fourth panel. That to me is pure comic gold. Although maybe not as fun as the following news report on bears.

It’s almost like a Simpsons joke, but in real life.

Woah, shadowed out eyes, serious time. And the whole off size panel thing. Looking at my originals I realized I re-sized the panel to make up for a mistake I had made in the drawing. Let’s take a look at a scan of that panel.

So let’s talk a little about my process. At this point I would pencil out the pages, then ink and then do massive corrections in Photoshop. Of important note here is that Jam in the Band is the first time I ever did hand lettering on a comic. I used to just leave space for the bubbles and text. But now I was actually incorporating the bubbles and the text into the overall panel design.

Honestly though, I hate my lettering, that’s why I go over it with a font. But it helps me to at least KNOW how much of the panel the text is going to take up.

Also, I fill in all the blacks in Photoshop. This lets me tinker with them more. As a video editor, I need the ability to play with and manipulate the image

So this used to be where I would end the comic when I would pass it out as a little preview mini. Pictured here:

I think Optical Sloth was one of the few places that reviewed that book. You should check out his reviews of all of my previous work to get a good idea of what I was doing before Jam in the Band.

Most of those comics are um… not worthy of re-printing. Or even putting up on the web. As in, they’re terrible. But to any of you folks just starting to make you own comics, I give you this advice. You’re going to have to make many MANY terrible comics before you start to make anything worthwhile.

So this is true. Every spring in Syracuse this would happen. One day you’re wearing 5 layers, the next everyone is running around in their underwear.

Oh so it was around this time in the making of this comic that I discovered Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains. And I swear that I had no knowledge of the film before I started writing Jam in the Band. But yeah, they’re kind of similar, all-girl band gets out of crappy small town and makes it big. Anyways, you can watch most of it here:

Not a bad film. But seriously, the whole story of how this movie wasn’t seen for like 20 years or something is the most interesting part about it. And there’s a video about that too: