EPTI was in 8th grade when I decided I wanted to work in comics. It was one of those dreams you have when you're a kid that never pans out. Y'know the kind... where you never ask yourself how you'll get a job, or even if you're qualified, you just assume if you do the work someone will decide to start paying you.
At first my goal was to become a superhero cartoonist. Could there be anything better, I wondered, than to get paid to express myself, creatively, by illustrating someone else's power-fantasy about characters I didn't own? At the time, my answer was "no, there could be nothing better."
I eventually outgrew the fantasy, but it took a while to do so. Before I met with disillusionment, I had to make it through highschool and new fantasies of doing self-published "indie" comics. In highschool, I made comics with my friend, K.O. I bring this up, btw, because nostalgia is the impetus for these blogs.
Sometime during our sophomore year, K.O. and I began work on a comic titled Requiem for the Chasseur. It would turn out to be the only collaborative work that we would take to completion, but it was ambitious. Exceeding 300 pages and selling relatively well to our classmates, it did a lot to fuel our egos and keep the dream alive.
A couple months ago I ran across the first issue, bathed in xerox toner and rusted staples, and thought to myself, "good times."
Unfortunately, I no longer possess a full run of Requiem. I only have the first and second issue, and a page from what I believe was the last issue. Maybe some "kid" from our highschool, who would be ~30 by now, has them entombed in their parents' basement somewhere, but it is out of reach. What better way to remember it than by re-imagining it? Maybe I can recapture what was fun about it? Who knows...
The concept for Requiem was simple enough: a convict escapes from prison with a plot to kill the men responsible for his incarceration. His weapon of choice: a katana, though he also used guns, clamore mines, TNT, grenades and at one point a rocket launcher. His strategy for social interaction: non-sequiturs, pretentious book quotes, disconnected rambling, and extreme, often senseless violence. The villian: the CEO of a multinational that for some reason dabbles in illegal enterprises and spares no expense in trying to eliminate the protagonist. It was naive, fun, and completely silly.
The comic below is a reworking of Requiem's first three pages.
P.S. Mr. Pessimist wins the bet.
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Fanaticism #4
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/qYNXk.png)
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Additional Resources
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/tuDhb.png)
<font size=1>A page from issue one of the original book, by K.O.</font>
![[image loading]](http://imgur.com/mXVwS.png)
<font size=1>A page from the end of the last issue, also by K.O. I think it's cool seeing the leap his drawings took as his style developed.</font>
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