The primary villain for Super Duper Ham 2013 was the Cyclops, whose artificial mind could not be detected by the Ion’s telepathy. Transforming drones would have been positioned around Mammapolis. This one would unfold from the top of a telephone pole.
I made this drawing to show a less cartoony version of the Ion, drawing inspiration from a move poster for Superman Returns.
In Super Duper Ham: Day One, Abe was still figuring out his costume. I made this drawing to show a potential evolution that would align with the look of his mentor, the Ion.
I wanted to see if I could take my concept for Super Duper Ham: Day One and turn it into a comic book series. This was my most ambitious project to date. I spent months on world-building and character histories, outlining the lives of several characters through what I hoped would be an epic story. I also established a reasonable schedule to write, draw, and publish my first comic book series.
As I have for other projects, I created the panel compositions in Adobe Illustrator. But this time, I printed them out and drew all the panel art, speech bubbles, and sound effects in by hand. It was an interesting experiment, but the drawing process became much more stressful, especially when I messed up a panel here or there and knew I would need to replace it.
The first issue was self-published in 2013.
It wasn’t until I had the first issue out and was preparing to start on the second that I noticed some problems with my story. Big problems. The first issue established defining details about Mammapolis and my protagonist that limited the potential impact of the story.
This could have been good, but I wanted the project to be great. So, I decided to shelve the whole thing until I could rework the story and make it the best it could be.