So over the holidays I suffered a catastrophic sudden death of my flash drive that took all the original colour files for the first 20 pages as well as a bunch of supporting files, the teaser pictures and assorted random images. The dead key has gone off to a Data Recovery house in the hopes of saving the files, but in the event that it is either impossible or cost prohibitive, that work will have to be re-done.

To re-do all that work, I’ve been looking into getting some help. The first applicant is my son. His try out sample is above. While he does work faster than I do, his focus is off and I’m not sure DFS is ready for such an avant garde approach. Maybe if we get Ralph Steadman to draw a few pages…

So while I wait for news, and my kid works on his technique, you can begin making donations to the data recovery fund at dummyoughtaknowbetter@egestacomics.com.

The good news is the web files were saved separately and we’ll have the next page for you on Wednesday as normal.

-Chris

The end of 2009 saw us begin the first new DFS story in over 15 years. Wow. We’re back telling the crazy tales of Alex and Walter and the odd people and places they encounter. And it’s already been great. We’re starting to re-connect with people we haven’t seen or heard from in years. And we no longer have to think of ourselves as those guys who used to do this comic way back when.

And we’ve been at it less than a month.

2010 is full of potential. A return to doing conventions, meeting old and all new fans. Becoming a part of the new comic wave, we were there for the black and white, self publishing movement in the 90’s and now the webcomic world, where anybody can find and read your work without leaving their toilet chair. And we haven’t even started on some of the fun and silly stuff we’ve talked about doing.

Oh yeah, and did I mention the new DFS story?

-Chris

So here we are at the end of another year, one that saw us finally get back to telling comic book stories with our characters Alex and Walter.  We’ve attempted on numerous occasions to pick up our series Dressed for Success but 2009 was the year that the ball started rolling again.

It has been fun getting to flex those familiar creative muscles once more and set our characters on a new path of silly adventures.  It has also been enlightening to be presenting it in an entirely new format, that of the online webcomic.

While 2009 was a time for us to get our feet wet with publishing a weekly online comic series, 2010 will be a full year of possibilities and I look forward to seeing where it leads us as well as Alex and Walter.

-Jeff

On the internet, colour is free. So when it came time to start the new DFS online, we of course decided it would be in colour. And Jeff was already doing the art, so it fell to me to do the colouring. I’d done a few things way back when for posters, swag and such, but we’d never actually done pages in colour. And I worked with traditional stuff like markers, pencil crayon or watercolours. The only digital colouring we’d done was for the previous website, and that was mostly just figures.

What I’ve learned so far is that there’s a lot of decisions to be made when colouring, and I had no basis for them, except what seemed okay to me.

One of the most difficult decisions was how to handle the eyes of Mississauga Jay’s sister Celeste. Jeff had drawn her with empty ovals for eyes with an indication of eyelashes. Eyes were kind of a new thing, Alex and Walter are always wearing glasses, and most of our other characters had done so also, kind of a little oddity of the DFS’verse.

My initial inclination was to just fill them with white. I did up a page or two that way, but Jeff wasn’t so sure that worked, so I tried some other options.

What’s funny is that in the end, the all white still seemed best. But I saved the others, to share. Okay I saved the others cause I thought the Lynn Johnston eyes were funny, sue me.

- Chris

When we were deciding on what the first new DFS story would be, we looked at ideas we’d had in the past, plot threads left dangling from the previous stories and what things were going on right now that might be fun to have a jab at and still provide a good jumping off point for new stories. Well culturally one of the things going on was we’d had the first new Indiana Jones movie in an equally long time.

Hmmm… We both like Indy, lot’s of other people do as well it seems. He’s not been parodied nearly as much as some things. He’s back on peoples minds, (and I’m not going to debate the virtues of Crystal Skull, you can do that amongst yourselves if you feel the need) and funny enough, we’ve been wanting and meaning to do an Indy story for a long time.

As it turns out, a really long time, and we’ve been trying to do so over and over. The character of Mississauga Jay goes back to the earliest days of DFS. We ran a bit of a contest way back to name our letter column or editorial page or some such, and the prize was an original drawing. Well the winner was a friend of ours, and Jeff at some point did do a drawing, and it was our friend dressed up like Indiana Jones. I honestly don’t know if he ever got that drawing I’m sad to say. But the image stuck with us. As did the idea of using this character, dubbed Mississauga Jay.

We never managed to put him into the old series, but when I was looking back over the previously discussed missing stories, I came upon an outline detailing Jay and his sister’s involvement in the story, leading into a very Indy like adventure. Then with DisasterWorld, if you look at the cast shot you’ll see them again, this time as contestants.

It seems, almost unconsciously, we’ve been trying to make it up to Jay all these years. And now here we are with a great big, full on Indy style story with Jay front and centre, fedora, satchel, jacket and all. It’s taken us a long time, but here’s hoping he, as well as you enjoy the story.

Oh.

And while we’re at it, Happy Birthday Doctor Jay. Hope it’s a beauty!

- Chris

egesta-dd.com

After deciding we weren’t going to be able to follow up on our plans to begin DFS as a full sized comic, Jeff and I decided to take a break and wait to see what the future might hold. And then Lennon’s idea of life happened. We were still friends, but we got busy with our lives. Jeff ended up moving across the country and going back to school. I finished University, worked, ended up acting during the summer and getting married. Jeff got into website design and I eventually was doing print design work, not exactly comics, but still artistic work.

We’d see each other maybe once a year, but thanks to email we kept in touch and started talking about bringing Dressed For Success back to life. Webcomics were becoming more prevelent, and we liked the idea of being to reach many more people. We also had some other comic and none comic things we thought we could share. So we looked into creating a online presence.

Egesta-dd.com logo

Wanting to describe our new venture we hit upon the name Egesta Digital Diversions. It had the old name and the idea of something light hearted and fun, which was what we were aiming for. We did a design up, Chris working on the backside functionality and Jeff focusing on the visuals. Lofty ideas included an annotated version of the original 25 issues of DFS, with the layouts and other behind the scenes information. Ping Pong comics were stories where Jeff and Chris would trade panels, Colt Renfrew the hard boiled Truant Officer and others filled out the roster.

Disasterworld cast

As for new DFS stories, the timing was right for a parody of reality television. Alex and Walter were set to participate in a grandiose Survivor type program called DisasterWorld. We cast the story and worked out the general plot, but technical and personal challenges ended up stalling the project and egesta-dd.com was abandoned.

What seems like a short time later, Jeff moved back and ended up living with Chris for 6 months. Webcomics had become more prevalent and there were systems in place to make it easy to setup your work on the web. And now that Chris and Jeff could regularly meet and work, it finally seemed time for Alex and Walter to return to the comic world.

And on December 9th, they will.

At the end of the small press run of Dressed for Success, Alex and Walter were adrift in space in an escape pod and that’s the last the world saw of them. In a few short days, they will return with all new adventures.

But there were other stories which never saw the light of day.

script page for issue 26

We never meant to be gone so long. After issue 25, the plan had been to take DFS to the next stage as a full sized comic, distributed by all the big distributors, in stores across the continent, every small pressers dream. And we started down that path. We knew about printers, costs, etc. We’d dealt with the distributors when we did the Dirty Baker’s Dozen trade paperback.

So we started talking about what the story was going to be. Would we pick up where 25 left off, or jump ahead as we’d done previously to ‘one point in time’. The story we ultimately decided upon was risky, in fact it could be said it was crazy for a ‘new’ series, but we felt sure of ourselves and plunged ahead.

We wrote, Jeff drew, Chris started exploring the technical possibilities for computerized black and white ‘tones’ and plowed ahead on the first few issues, meaning to build up a couple issue safety net to avoid falling behind once we began publishing.

sample page from issue 26

All of this was occurring in the late nineties. If you know anything about the comics industry, you’ll be saying uh-oh. We had just come through a very strong and positive time for black and white comics from small, independent publishers. Dave Sim’s series of Independent comic shows and the birth of Alternative comic shows made for a great swell in interest and support for the little comic guy.

So of course the corporations peed in the pool.

Marvel and DC began signing exclusivity deals with Distributors and some of the other middle sized publishers followed suit. Creators similarly signed exclusive deals. Suddenly there was a battle between distributors, retailers were forced to sign contracts and meet minimums, companies folded, Marvel bought their distributor Heroes World, only to file for Bankruptcy a few years later and then to sign with the only Distributor left standing.

Sample pencils for issue 27

The net result was an industry which had lost a massive number of stores and readers. And that meant creators as well. Sales on major superhero comics plummeted, and the little guy didn’t stand much of a chance.

And there’s us, with a couple issues in the works and the future we’d been hoping for pulled out from under us through no fault of our own. And we needed to live and eat and all that stuff. So we decided to step back, shelve the work we’d done, and see what the future held.

Next time…

Egesta Digital Distractions

I’ve been wondering since we launched the Egesta Comics website and began posting content to it, whether or not people were annoyed or confused by the fact that what we were adding was poster images and not actual comic book story pages.

After all, this is meant to be an ongoing Dressed For Success web comic site.  So what are we doing?

It has been part of the history of Dressed for Success to take popular movie posters and create parodies starring our characters Alex and Walter.  In the early days of the mini comics we would actually use them as issue covers. In fact, the first 13 issues of our 25 issue mini comics run sported covers based on popular movie posters. So as Chris and I were planning the launch of the website we thought it might be fun to bring these back and start off with a number of new examples.

We like to think of them as a series of teasers for potential stories yet to come.  Plus they are  just plain fun to do.  Truth be told, some of them may be more than just a tease for what to expect. Once the ongoing story has started we still intend to put out the occasional parody movie poster but we will find somewhere else on the site to house them.

So while it may be slightly annoying for those of you who want to jump right into the meat and potatoes of the new adventures of Alex and Walter, I would simply ask for your patience.  Just consider these like the trailers at the movie theatre before the main attraction.

Oh, and while you’re at it, make sure to turn off your cell phones and pagers.

Jeff

I have a confession to make.

I’m dying to share the new DFS with you. I want to just post everything we’ve done, I want to sit down over drinks and spill my guts about every minute detail of the story to come and where it’s going, and the story after that, and all the other little details about the world where Alex and Walter live.

I want to be going to conventions and meeting people who’ve read our work and people who are discovering it for the first time. I want to be embroiled in comics, I want to be corresponding with readers and doing silly interviews and coming up with wacky marketing ideas and making cool Dressed For Success stuff for people to put on their desks.

I miss it.

Those heady days in the 90’s were some of my favorites and I can just begin to feel the buzz returning. I want you to know how much fun it already is. To be back telling stories about Alex and Walter; killing ourselves laughing while we hash out a script. I’m jumping around like an idiot demonstrating something one of the characters does.

So I’m going to let a little bit slip. The tiniest morsel.

tinkle. ditch. baglay.

And this: 

I know, three words and a hand. It’s not much, but i feel a bit better. Have I made it worse for you?

Chris

No really, Hi!

Welcome to Egesta Comics, or more importantly, welcome to Dressed For Success and the adventures of Alex Corbett and Walter Andrewkowski. It really is exciting to be back at it after all this time. Not that it doesn’t come with some trepidation. But once we started talking and the ideas started, it all felt very familiar and we were soon having fun and coming up with more ideaas than we’ll ever be able to get too.

If you aren’t familar with Egesta Comics and Dressed For Success, there’s a quick run down of our History as well as some tidbits about us on the aptly named  About Us page. After you discover that we’ve done a whole buch of stories previously in print, you’re going to ask, “But how will I know what’s gone before?” Well, you can read a quick summary of What Has Come Before, or take the plunge and order some of our wares. And for even more details, you can consult the ever growing Who’s Wha? listings.

After all that, go and pee. Then come back and get ready for the new adventures of Alex and Walter. We hope you have as much fun as we do.

Chris