The Beginning
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An example of some of the early comic books my brother and I used to draw. Click here to see close-up view.
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The Zoom Comics Group went online in 1997, but its history begins somewhat before that. It actually has its roots in the seventies, when I was a kid, and drawing comics was one of my favorite things to do. I don't know exactly what it was that first compelled me to set pencil to paper, although I'm sure it had to do with emulation of my older brother, Ron. He would decide to draw something first, and if he could do it, then by God, so could I. As near as I can remember, the earliest drawings we did were of automobile tires. Our father fixes cars for a living, so it is no surprise that cars had a big influence on our life.
By the time I was six or seven years old, the drawings had expanded to whole cars. These were usually fantastic dragsters, drawn flatly in landscape orientation on a piece of loose-leaf filler paper, with the vehicle resting on the bright red border line of the paper. Of course, these were a big hit with our friends, and the popularity they created ensured a continuance of more and more drawings. Then, one day, Ron brought home something that would change both of our lives: a comic book.
Some of the comic strips drawn for The State News, the student newspaper of Michigan State University. Click here to read these strips.
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Both my brother and I immediately became hooked on comic books, and both began putting any extra money we had towards them. Strangely enough, even though I was reading comic books, it never occurred to me that I could draw my own. My brother started to draw his own, and through his influence, I also began drawing comic books. I continued drawing comic books throughout high school, where this eventually culminated in a magazine that I produced called the Smudge. This was pretty popular in High School, but when I went to college, I had little time to continue such endeavors, and my artistic bent began to be directed towards fine arts painting. I did publish some Daily strips in the the Michigan State University newspaper, The State News, and worked slowly (about 1 page a year) on a comic story called "Secret Agent Pig", which I never finished.
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A comic story started while in college. Click here to see close-up view.
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After college, I stayed in Lansing, MI and played in several punk bands. I drew comics once in a while, drawing an early version of The Dick Ramrod Mystery "The Strange Case of the Super-Flatulator." I was more involved at the time in the music scene than the comics scene, so nothing ever really came of this. It seemed that comics in the eighties had really started to suck (at least in my opinion). Everyone seemed to be either a Frank Miller or a Todd McFarlane clone, and I personally found the story treatments to be somewhat silly (even heroes such as Daredevil started to act like they were getting off on beating up people, and every villain started to have a twisted maniacal grin a la McFarlane's Venom character ). The stories in these eighties era comics seemed to be way over-told, as the relative breeziness of the sixties and seventies Marvel Comics stories that I grew up with gave way to a crowded, dense prose, coupled with dark, brooding artwork, for which I had no time or interest in reading.
1994 - Drawing Comics Again
Sometime in 1994, I was living in a huge loft on the South side of Chicago with the band I was in at the time, Food Chain. It was at this time that I decided to get serious about comics again. I had been reading Peter Bagge's Hate and Robert Crumb's Wierdo, and I started getting the inspiration again to create comics of my own. During the previous couple of years, I had made some feeble attempts to get involved with comics again, but nothing more than a page or two here or there. I decided to get serious, went out and bought some good professional art supplies, and set about drawing. I drew the first two strips of what later was to become the Johnny Zoom character - although at this time, I was calling him Johnny Thunderr. I was influenced by some vintage Dick tracy comic books at the time, so "Johnny Thunderr was going to be sort of a Dick tracy in the future." I had written an entire week of daily strips, but began thinking perhaps that these strips didn't really fit the "daily strip" genre as well as i liked, and maybe would be better suited for a weekly comic in something like The Chicago Reader. So, I scrapped the daily comic thing and began retooling it as a weekly one-page strip.
Johnny Thunderr - The original Johnny Zoom. Click here to read these strips.
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In the course of living in the loft with Food Chain, I had become acquainted with something that was soon to change all of our lives - The World Wide Web. I had heard of the Internet, and later the Web, but didn't really think I would end up being such a part of it. Food Chain launched a website in 1994, due to Alex Sosa and John Duncan, two band members who were also into computers. I realized immediately that this could be a new way to distribute comics to the world. Even though I didn't even own a computer, I started reading and memorizing a book on HTML and the Web. Alex and John donated me some server space, and in 1994, I put two pages of comics on the Web. These pages were the retooled Johnny Thunderr character, but I never got beyond the first two pages at this point. I got married and moved out of the loft, and since I didn't own a computer at this time, the web comics experiment fell by the wayside - although I continued to draw comics in a serious way.
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Johnny Thunderr - The weekly version. Click here to see close-up view.
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Over the next year or so, I wrote and drew the comics that were to make up Rule The World Comics #1 ; "Dick Ramrod - The Strange Case of the Super-Flatulator," "Bobby Smithers - Six-year Old Computer Genius," and "The Saga of Cyborg X" (the last based on a character I had created when I was a teenager). I spent three days drawing the most detailed cover I could, showing Bobby Smithers as ruler of the world. A friend who worked for a copy center Xeroxed 100 copies of this book for me, and I started to try to distribute it.
Soon, I had another story completed,"(Hal Smeckens - Brilliant Surgeon Whose Wife Likes To Clean House In the Nude)," so I added that to the mix and printed some more books with all four stories included.
I sent copies of these books to every major underground comics publisher I could find, and soon was greeted with a round of rejection letters ("not our style," "far too unpolished," "perhaps you should establish a fan base first," etc.). Unddaunted (well, a little daunted, but not enough to give up), I kept on drawing comics, even though I had no way to publish or distribute them on any kind of scale. I took out free classifieds to try to sell them mail-order, and sold none. I got a couple of comic shops to sell them on consignment, but they didn't really sell, as they looked like what they were -- unknown home-made comics with little or no collector's value.
Over the next year, I drew two issues of The Spasms (based on my true-life experiences playing with punk bands), and "The Adventures of Beef-Girl" and "Punjee" (the last unpublished as of this date, but slated to appear soon in Zoom Graphics Comics and Stories #3. I was copying these into little mini-comics (8.5 x 11" copied both sides and folded over) and put the label The Zoom Comics Group on them (based on the nickname "Johnny Zoom," which I was known as to many people at the time). I sent these stories out to publishers also, and soon had increased my collection of rejection slips. It seems I am far too untalented and my comics are far too unpolished to take a chance on. Despite this, I still was not ready to give up.
1997 - The Zoom Comics Group goes on-line
In the fall of 1996, I got a job as a web designer for a company in Chicago's Loop (quite a feat, considering at that time I had still never owned a computer). I immediately bought the domain name zoomgraphics.com and decided I was going to give web comics another try. I stayed at late work and scanned the first issue of Rule the World Comics # 1, and started trying to figure out how to present it on the Web. I knew that I did not want to present the pages as standard printed page formats. A computer screen is not shaped like a standard comic book; it is wider than it is long. To read a comic page on the web in it's entirety means scrolling to the bottom of it, then clicking to "turn the page" and scrolling down again. I was determined that there would be only "page-turning," no scrolling if I could help it. So I broke the pages into smaller units that would fit more easily into a single page-view, with no vertical scrolling. I was just begining to learn how to manipulate images in the computer, so I did not color these early comic scans, just prepared to present them in their glorious black-and-white (or off-white and sometimes over-contrasted yellow, as I still did not really have sufficient experience with computer graphics to clean them up as nice as I wanted).
The cover of Rule The World Comics #1. This is the original DIY printed comic book, parts of which were later scanned to become the first online issue from The Zoom Comics Group. Click here to view a close-up of this drawing.
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1996-97 was still the era of the 28.8 modem, so I realized right away that there was this nasty issue of download time. I knew each page was going to take some time to download, and that was the single most vexing issue I faced at the time. That's one of the reasons I made the pages into smaller units. I was also determined to find a way to preload the next page, so that as you finished a page, you could click the "next" button, and the next page would appear immediately and be ready to read, while the page after that would start to download as you read the current one. The solution was the "Zoom Graphics Loader-o-matic," an ingeniously simple way to achieve the pre-loading of pages, conceived and designed by the afore-mentioned John Duncan of Food Chain. With this problem solved, I continued to format the first online version of The Zoom Comics Group.
Another issue that was important to me was to present the stories not just as on-line comic stories, but as on-line comic books. I felt (and still feel) that the tactile sense of a comic book is part of its enjoyment - turning the pages, having an interesting cover, a letters section, and so on. I was determined to present these comics as online comic books, and thus set the precedent that The Zoom Comics Group continues to follow to this day. The first online issue of Rule the World Comics was set up to contain a selection of stories, not just one, and had a cover and a letters page (feedback from the printed versions) - just like a real comic book. As far as I know, The Zoom Comics Group, while perhaps not the first to put comics on the web, is the first to actually create and design comic books to be read on-line -- not just stories or comic books scanned and put on the web, but actual comics books designed expressly for the Web, with covers, letters' pages, and so on.
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The Spasms original printed cover.This was later scanned and published by The Zoom Comics Group online in 1998. Click here to see close-up view.
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With all these issues solved and the formatting complete, Rule the World Comics #1 went online in the spring of 1997 at the same url as The Zoom Comics Group is today. The first issue, as previously stated, was published in glorius black and white, and didn't really look like a comic book - it was the cover drawing with links to each story. Still, it read like a comic book, and contained three stories, "Dick Ramrod - The Strange Cae of the Super-Flatulator," "Bobby Smithers - Six-year Old Computer Genius," and "The Adventures of Beef Girl." I sent out e-mails to everyone I could, and started to spread the word however I could. In 1997, only a fraction of today's Web audience existed, and response was pretty non-existant.
I continued on, and later that year published online Rule the World Comics #2, featuring two more stories drawn for the original print versions of the comic book, ("Hal Smeckens - Brilliant Surgeon Whose Wife Likes To Clean House In the Nude," and "The Saga of Cyborg X.") Early in 1998, I published online The Spasms #1 and The Spasms #2, both once again in glorious black-and-white, and was working on new comics for Rule The World Comics #3. As I was working on these comics, I realized these would be the first comics I would draw that would be specifically for the Web medium, and I could start changing the rules a little bit. I also became fixated on the idea of getting these comics presented in full-color, instead of the black-and-white versions I was putting on-line.
One of the early experiments in designing full color comics for the web. Click here to view a close-up of this drawing.
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In that first year, 1997, I bought my first computer and software, and started experimenting with ways to add color to the comics. I finished the artwork for Rule The World Comics #3, but still hadn't found the best way to add color to the panels, so it was published in black-and-white like the earlier issues. I started drawing a new Spasms comic in full color, using acrylic paint, and painted a splash panel for it, but didn't like the results I got when I scanned it. The color kind of washed out, and I realized then I would have to draw the comics in black and white and color them on the computer, after they were scanned.
Using the scans I had ofRule The World Comics #3, I soon discovered a method of coloring the comics using layers in Adobe Photoshop, and finally was starting to get the results I wanted. I colored all the stories in that comic book, and started getting set to reissue it, in full color. At the same time, I began designing a new comic book, the first one that was 100 percent designed to be read online. In doing so, I was determined to make a complete break with the printed page, while at the same create the definitive online comic book.
1998 - Color Me Zoom
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The premiere issue of Johnny Zoom.
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Johnny Zoom #1 was published online on June 1, 1998. It was the first comic that I felt lived up to being an "online comic book." For the first time, the entire book was in full color, just like a real comic book. The cover was modeled after comics books from Marvel's Silver Age. To reinforce the point of it being a comic book, I even put in the sub-text "The Internet's Greatest Comic Magazine!" Inside, the pages were designed to the relative resolution, size and width of the average computer user's monitor (at the time), lowest common demonominator: 640 x 480. You'll see that if you are viewing in this aspect ratio, the pages fill the screen nicely, with no horizontal or vertical scrolling needed. The other advantage of designing to this aspect ratio is the file sizes would be smaller and the pages would download more smoothly, using the Loader-o-matic. Extensive testing on the earlier comic books (Rule The World) showed that smaller pages were better, because some people read really fast, and I wanted to be sure that next page was loaded and waiting. To me, the most important part of the page sizes was that they were not designed at all to conform to any known common page dimensions in the print world. These pages were completely designed to be read on a computer monitor, and specifically delivered through a web browser.
In addition to the full color first issue of Johnny Zoom, I reissued Rule The World Comics #3 in full color, and took down all the earlier black-and-white comic books. The site was now in full color. Finally, I felt like I was really achieving what I set out to do. The comic books looked like comic books, and read like comic books, in an online format. I began working on subsequent issues of Johnny Zoom, and began the process of coloring and reissuing the earlier black-and-white comics, through publication in a new title, Zoom Graphics Comics and Stories.
2002 - Beware, the future!
Over the next four years, I published three more issues of Johnny Zoom, two issues of Zoom Graphics Comics and Stories, and, this year, the first issue of Beware, a not-so-subtle homage to the great horror comics of EC. I have received e-mails from all over the world, some with praise and some with criticism.
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In 2002, The Zoom Comics Group is proud to announce a new title - BEWARE - Terror Tales. Here is an early draft of the host, Brother Beware. Slight modifications were made for the final version of the character.
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One of the criticisms was the color scheme used in Johnny Zoom. Many felt that it was too bright or colorful, or didn't make sense. In actuality, the color scheme was a bit of a reaction to the current comics' trend of dark, moody artwork. My favorite comics were always the brightly colored comics of the sixties. Of course, everything was colored kind of day-glo in the sixties, but it seemed to give things a cool campy look. If you watch a Star Trek episode from that period, you might see a heavy dramatic scene on another world, with Captain Kirk in a bright yellow shirt, and behind him a bright pink sky. I have a Fantastic Four comic book from that era where on a couple of pages there are brilliant purple and green backgrounds for no apparent reason whatsoever. The whole effect of these colorations is what I am after in Johnny Zoom. Perhaps I've succeeded a little too well.
Another criticism was my particular drawing style, which some people don't seem to like. There's not much I am going to do about that except keep at it. One thing many people don't realize is that when you do it for a living, you have an enormous amount of time to devote to perfecting the artwork, but when you work at a job 40-50 hours a week doing something else, as I still do, you have to get it finished however you can. When I was in college and was taking life drawing and studying art 24/7, my artwork was probably looser and more natural looking, but I've regressed a bit since then. In many ways, I still draw like I did when I was 14 years old. In any case, I certainly am not ever going to draw comics "the Marvel way." And so what? If there is anything I would like to do to my drawing to make it better is find more time to do it, and work from life a lot more. I certainly do not want to develop some ridiculous "drawing style" where heroes arms look like balloons, and women have a waist the size of your wrist. What I would like to do is become more consistent in my illustration, and now that I'm drawing regularly again, I can see a slow, steady improvement. I also am trying to work on more detail, as I've found that many people like to see detailed drawings. In any case, I'm sure people will let me know how I'm doing on this.
Other criticisms included my writing ("the dialogue doesn't ring true,") the format ("it would be better if each page were shaped like a printed comic book page,") and pretty much almost every other aspect of what I'm doing. And that's only some of the people who bother to e-mail. I've sent e-mails to a bunch of comic review sites, and have largely been ignored. I've only ever read one published review of my site, and it wasn't good. People like Scott Mccloud and Mike Manly have sent me nice e-mails, but still pretty much largely ignore the existence of The Zoom Comics Group. It can be pretty disheartening at times.
But I must be doing something right. My server logs are indicating more and more people every day are visiting The Zoom Comics Group. And not only are they visiting, they are staying and reading the comic books from beginning to end. And I have gotten positive e-mails from people who really get what I'm trying to do here. I have received e-mails from people who can't wait for the next issue of Johnny Zoom. The other day I got an e-mail from someone who said that they read the premiere issue of Johnny Zoom and loved it, then thanked me for it. Well, all I can say is, thank you, for taking the time to read my comic books. I can't tell you how great it is when I get a message from someone who likes what I'm doing and tells me so. It really makes my day. It doesn't bother me that the comics intelligensia doesn't like my work as long as I know there are people out there like yourselves who do. There is a core group of people reading The Zoom Comics Group, and it is growing every day, and it is this knowledge that helps to keep me going with it, even when I am reading something that is less than postitive in regards to my work.
And keep going I shall. There are several new works going into production at this time, at least one of which involves Macromedia Flash and some audio components. Many new directions are being considered, including full-blown web cartoons, and multi-threaded sequential Flash stories. Of course, the traditional web comic as I've defined it thus far will always have a place here, as well. A comic book, after all, is still just a comic book. And sometimes that's all we need it to be.
Randal Huiskens
March 24, 2002
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