As I said in my last post, this year’s Night Watchman project came about in 2020. After my late father’s retirement, he took a part time overnight job at Meramec Springs State Park outside St. James, MO. He had taken my brother and I there a lot in our youth to fish and get outdoors. The park features a spring with an average daily flow of one hundred million gallons of water, a trout hatchery, and perhaps most interesting it is the 19th century site of the old Meramec Iron Works. Portion of the site remain, including the old furnace stacks- grave markers of an industry that ran it’s course before the 20th century arrived. See more about that here: Springfield-Greene County Library -- Bittersweet (thelibrary.org).
My father’s tenure as “Night Watchman” was short-lived, possibly due to lack of interest, but the seeds of inspiration were planted. I would later tell my young nephew stories about his retired Grandpa's brief stint as a nighttime security guard at Meramec Springs- “what if” scenarios involving aliens hiding out there, pursued by the FBI, or maybe … hidden there by the FBI ?? And so on… for years the kid went on and on about my taking it on as a comic book project. I didn’t even consider myself a cartoonist and knew nothing about the process.
But in 2019, I began making fantasy/sci-fi drawings again after a years-long hiatus from artmaking, and by the end of 2020, I had produced the cover art for a fictitious comic book called The Nightwatchman. I framed one as a Christmas gift to my ailing father, whom for months I had chased from hospital to rehabilitation facility, to another hospital, to a nursing home throughout the pandemic, until we finally took him home for hospice. Just a couple days later things quickly went downhill, and he passed away quietly on Christmas morning after that terrible year. He never got to see my final gift to him.
Five months later, I purchased an iPad Pro and began learning to use Procreate, doing a few illustration jobs with it before returning to my Night Watchman idea in March of 2023. I have about ten pages drawn to date and am unsure how long it should be, as I’ve ignored all reasonable advice and have so far created unscripted, organically. But then, there is little sense in a grown man deciding to draw comics in the middle of his life. For the first time, my work will be published in a comic this year, two pinups for a treasury edition-sized spy-fi anthology, G.H.O.S.T. Agents: Crimson Reckoning (Cosmic Lion Productions). It seems like a good jumping point into doing something a little more substantial on my own, and I have produced a couple demo pages for other ideas as well. My father was very supportive of my being an artist throughout my life, his influence still present, even in my recent pivot to comics through an idea involving him as the lead character!