Two years ago today, Drop Dead Vince went online for the very first time!
It's funny, I never thought that this comic would take up so much of my time (and my life too) but here we are. In fact, Vince started out as something pretty simple.
Back in late 2010 I was working on another webcomic called
Johnny Angel Loves Elenore Rigby, about a young rockabilly musician who falls in love with a girl who works at a gothic lolita clothing store in San Francisco. The project was eventually shelved since it was a pretty big story and since I was just starting out in webcomics it would have been smarter to start out small. At the time I was working on characters for the comic and one of them was the main character's, Johnny Angel's, friend who was a psychobilly musician and the frontman of a band called the Wrekkin Krew. I was doing research on psychobilly culture and I discovered an artist and musician named
Vince Ray. I was really inspired by his work and found it really unique and creative, especially these two pieces he had designed as stickers for
Poster Pop:
Eventually that led me to create a mascot character for Johnny's friend's fictional band who at the time was named Boney Betty, who eventually became Vince's co-star and object of undead affections Betty Baker:
This was the first image of her, unfinished since I was experimenting in creating a tattoo flash-style pin up while emulating Vince Ray's style and never really got around to finishing it. The little doodles surrounding her of the skeleton dude was me messing around at the time but this guy soon became our main character, Vince Valiant.
Here's an semi-official first doodle I did of Vince, who is actually named after Vince Ray (his full name is Vincent Ray Valiant). At the time he had a psychobilly wedge-style pompadour hairstyle and had a ratted bloody t-shirt under his leather jacket.
Eventually I was doodling the two nonstop and having them interact with each other. Around this time I was having trouble with Johnny Angel and my good friend Halie told me that maybe I could try doing a one shot comic with Vince and Betty. So I shelved Johnny Angel and started working on a 31 page one shot for these two. Sure enough, one comic eventually became ten chapters, other characters were created, and here we are today.
I launched
Drop Dead Vince on Valentine's Day in 2011 on
Smack Jeeves. I've had some up and downs with it (2011 was a bit of a rough year for it) but I refuse to give up on this project. Betty and Vince are both close to my heart and I hope that you will enjoy their adventures online. Stay tuned for more news and goodies in the not-so-distant future, Happy Valentine's Day!
