Free 4 All begins…

So I’ve started a daily comicstrip that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time. It’s a completely unauthorized work of fan-fiction set in the Marvel Universe on the day before Reed and Sue’s wedding in 1965. Basically it’s my chance to play around with characters and situations that meant a lot to me as I was growing up, a chance to tell stories that I always wanted to tell, and to harken back to a kind of comicbook fandom and material that fueled my interests in the artform if not the industry.

In today’s internet-enabled world sharing stories and ideas has become very easy. It’s also easy to share all the disappointing stories of failed creator’s rights and industry chicanery that can dishearten young fans from becoming artists and writers. It’s easy to become hardened, jaded and glib about comics in general when we can so easily see the industry’s pitfalls, pettiness and numerous examples of disillusionment.

But I remember these characters and the comic fandom of my youth quite differently. I think of my love of comics, particularly Marvel Comics,  as a defining part of adolescence and a great part of what shaped me as an adult and as an artist. To me then, it would seem a shame to let my love and enjoyment of that world simply fade away because the industry and the business end of comics itself may seem to have gone in a different direction. It just seems that there’s things here from my imagination, things I learned from Marvel Comics forty years ago, that are still worth doing and still worth sharing. And that’s the kind of art I want to make no matter what the business environment.

So, please, come and enjoy FREE 4 ALL, a daily strip Monday through Friday with a full-page edition on Saturday, and feel free to share it with friends. I’ll keep it going as long as I can and, hopefully, along the way we’ll be able to point out some other great fansites and examples of how loving comics isn’t quite as disheartening and cruel a thing as recent history would lead you to believe.

thanks,

-Rob