Icon Devil, Dominique in the kitchen

I like fun/sentimental stories about art, so I'll post one of my favorites:

This is a page from my old self-published indie comic Icon Devil, from vol 2 back in 1989.

In the late 1980s when I went to the San Diego Comic-Con twice, and had some original I.D. pages with me to sell, people would want the splash pages, action pages, girly pages. Even at the local cons up here in Canada, they'd ask for the more dynamic pages, those were the ones that sold first.

But this chapter in the book, I think this was five or six pages, was just of my character Dominique (super-power name was Esprit) getting up in the morning, getting breakfast, and looking for her housepets, while listening to the news on radio. No one's ever asked for these pages... until now. Back to that in a moment.

Little story: when I was writing/drawing this chapter of I.D. back in the late 80s, I had just asked out a girl at my gym. I was in fantastic shape back then, into bodybuilding and martial arts and cardio, every day. She was gorgeous and I could tell she was quite intelligent and creative; but aside from my - ahem - good looks, I think she thought I would be just another musclehead. But I was good looking so she agreed to meet for dinner. Ha.

We talked a bit over dinner, and I could see that she was nice, I liked her and she liked me, but no 'spark' was happening. I had a few photocopies that I'd gotten done that day, of this short Esprit story with Dominique. When my date asked what I did for a living, I hauled those photocopies out of my backpack and showed her. She hadn't known I was an artist. But I still remember this:

She kind of woke up and came alive. She looked at these photocopies, of Dominique in her kitchen, etc, and it was like a whole different person looking at me. Her eyes, her whole attention and personality started to light up. She kind of passed through a barrier; thinking she was just with another musclehead who probably had a mundane job... suddenly she sees this unusual creativity. And I'm sure the largest part of it is that it was THIS story, about Dominique. About a female. And not a sexualized female, like is all over comics, but a female just relaxing around the home. A real female person.

I did get that kind of surprise of duality back then from people; I was so strong, a fighter, adventurous, I would go out hitchhiking on my own for weeks and months, too; the gym and martial arts guys would be surprised I was an artist; the art people I would meet and hang with were surprised I looked like a warrior. They were all skinny or fat nerds, ha. I also did 'bouncing' (polite name is 'security') as a side-hustle some evenings, at events and clubs.

But never did I see the suddenness of surprise at that duality as pronounced as during that dinner moment with this girl. It was like half the dinner we were one type of person, the other half we were suddenly really close. The dynamic changed everything. Watching her as she first looked at those photocopies of these few pages, was like seeing an epiphany, an enlightenment in someone. She really changed, just in a few seconds. It was pretty amazing.

We fell in love and dated for for a couple of years. I kept moving around, going out on long hitchhiking adventures, so things didn't work out but we parted amicably in the early 1990s.

Fast forward to now, and I recently showed a CAF member all the Icon Devil pages I had left, after he inquired about pages for sale from Icon Devil. Surprise, surprise... the first person in my history to like that Dominique-in-the-kitchen page as much as I do. It was his first choice.

I'll never sell it. But it's a fun story and I thought I'd share the page. Collecting's about more than just the art - the stories can make it even better!