The Concept
I had a dream. To do a comic. That comic was called "Captain Binkle of Space Patrol". I still plan on releasing it one day. Anyway I kept mentioning it to people every time I got around to inking another line, and many people said "Cool! Can I be in it?" and I would say "Sure!" so that people would be my friends.
Cut to many years later when I become good friends with someone named Shauna. She has a sister Rhiannon. Their clever and funny banter made me think, "hey, they should be in my comic!", and the idea of the pirate sisters was born.
Cosmic Corsairs in Print
Well, a day to mark down in the history books, 12th October 2002 was the date of the inaugural OzComics 24 Hour Challenge. The challenge was to come up with 24 a page comic - from story to finished work. I thought of doing a Captain Binkle story, but didn't want to rush that, so I thought I'd use some supporting characters, the pirate sisters, Shauna and Rhiannon Corsette. Mainly because I could draw women better than men, and thought I'd try to play to my strengths.
24 hours later I had done the required 24 pages and crashed in a burning heap. I declared myself winner of the challenge, being the only person to finish all 24 pages. A few days later I came up with the title, Cosmic Corsairs as I was doing the cover, with their adventure being called "The Cubic Conundrum" (The 24 Hour Challenge of 2003 saw way too many people finishing, and my non-Cosmic-Corsair entry didn't make it to the top 3 - but that's obviously because it's gone all "commercial", man).
The Cosmic Corsairs saw printed form in November 2002 at the Comicfest convention in Bankstown Sydney. What a buzz! Met lots of cool people, and got a lot of positive feedback for my first comic ever. This inspired me to think of more adventures for the Corsette sisters to partake in.
I can't remember when I first started their next adventure, Sabotage on the Ulga. After finishing the 24 hour challenge I started doing Captain Binkle again, but that got old quickly. Early 2003 I wrote the Sabotage on the Ulga script and soon after started pencilling. A very demanding day-job and general displeasure at my own drawing abilities meant it was slow going. After Supanova 2003 in Sydney my enthusiasm was briefly renewed, but 2003 came and went with only half the comic done. February 2004 saw me pull my finger out and finish inking the whole thing, just like that! Grey-toning and lettering took another 3 weeks, and the cover soon after that.
Where to from here
Well, no movie deal yet, but I expect that's only a matter of time after Sabotage is launched at Sydney's Supanova convention in May. I'm in the process of downgrading that demanding day-job to a less demanding part-time one, and early plans are to finish another Cosmic Corsairs before the next Supanova in Brisbane later this year.