Alex Claw

They come at you when you least expect it.  In the dark, when you’re, sleeping, when you think you’re safe and they’re only after one thing. Your flesh.

Zombies, those badass mother-eating shamblers that cause that lower belly fear tingles.

I don’t know when I started loving the idea of zombies, after my whole introduction to the post apocalyptic world, definitely, but I think it was Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ that sealed the deal for me. Suddenly it was. “Oh, man, I love these shambling dead things so, so much”. I remember watching Return of the Living Dead and not taken by that form of zombie all that much, but Romero’s shambling easy to kill zombies? I loved them.

I watched that movie so many times. It was ingrained in my psyche, like bike driving.

Fast forward nearly a decade and many short stories and other things devoted my secret enamoration of the genre, I decide to make my own webcomic. Why? Because I like them and I wanted to draw better.  So was born the lovely little bit of genre loving work called All Manner of Bad.

All Manner of Bad was originally named, Dead Ahead. But then before I could begin drawing the webcomic, an actual print comic came out called Dead Ahead (about zombpocalypse survivors aboard a ship – get it? Iceberg ahead! Dead ahead! All speed ahead!, etc, etc.). So there went that title name, and it was such an awesome name. Then I wrote a short story called All Manner of Bad (post-apoc short story, but no zombies, but plenty of monsters, it’ll be up on Bitterwater Tales some months from now) and that name stuck with me.  I stole the name, slapped it on this webcomic and rolled on. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the beginning, it was seven days a week in color, with a full page, nine panel blast on Sundays. Then the usual happens, life. It got kicked down to five updates a week and black and white. Its been rolling that way for almost a year now. I think I like the black and white version a little bit better.

So now, 300 strips are under my belt and I have to admit that I feel a bit of accomplishment in that. I began the webcomic with a  bit of on the fly, not much planning in it, and here we are, fifteen months later, 300 strips later, and gods only know how many hours poured into it.

No regrets though. I’ve learned a lot about the whole webcomics world. It’s solidified my fence position on self publishing, and its opened up a whole lot of future options for me. I’m glad I made this move and I hope to continue it for another 300 or 3000.

Here’s a little slide show of the art progression…

My first titlecard, it was supposed to intro the Webcomic, display the three main characters that were going to be the focus of the webcomic. Bryan, Jase, and Dev. Dev was lost along the way, hanging out more with Kim than the other two.

Then the webcomic began and I began to get the hang of both tablet drawing and drawing in general.

Later on, the characters began to take better shape. The line art got better and I got more and more comfortable with drawing in Photoshop.  Progress! I dropped the color and began experimenting with both the way the characters looked. Bryan got longer hair, Jase rounder face, but same old scowl.

And this bit of artwork was drawn only minutes ago. I’ve truly grown as an artist.

Not bad. A year, three months, X amount of days, 300 strips.

Let the zombpocalyptic madness roll on.