Permalink | Leave a comment  »

2004. After much thinking and searching, after one simple sketch, I had come up with a character that to this very day, is without a doubt, my favorite of all my original creator owned properties.

Soon after "premiering" Dog Saint on the web via my web site's home page, the questions began to pour in. Almost everyone who saw the picture of the character asked me when I was going to deliver a comic of his. The answer was, soon.

I had the character. I needed the story behind the character. This, I believe, is where things began to get complicated for me. 

See, I've always been an Artist. But a Writer? That was another story. And believe it or not, just now, I am learning how to write. And little by little with the help of others.

Just around the time I created Dog Saint, a nice opportunity opened up with Undercurrent Comics down in the U.K. They were about to release the first issue of thier then flagship title Sam119, and were looking for a back up story. I sent in a short 2 page story I had written and drawn and that was picked up for issue #1. For issue #2 however, I knew I wanted to work on Dog Saint. The guys at Undercurrent Comics already had seen Dog Saint and expressed interest in including him in the comic beginning with issue #2. So I went to work on a short story called "Sewer Rats" that basically introduced Dog Saint and some of the supporting characters.

Here's the comic as it appeared in the pages of Sam119 #2. This was Dog Saint's first official appearance in print.

Starting with this story, there have been 3 incarnations of Dog Saint. All three with different origins. Sewer Rats saw Dog Saint as this amnesiac (hey, I still had not recovered from the popular 1990's amnesia super-hero aka: "let's skip the whole origins thing so we can get straight to the big guns and fight scenes till we figure out how to write a clever origin" thing) who was trying to figure out who or what he was and where he came from and why he was here.

The response to the story and comic in general was great. I didn't expect that. Time passed and, because of personal reasons, I could not complete the story for issue #3. 

And to make things more complicated, I began to dislike the direction I was going with Sewer Rats. So I scrapped the entire story line and decided to start over. This time, I thought to myself, why not start it as a web comic?

Yeah. A web comic.

But I'll get more into that next post :)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The year was 2004. I had just gotten back into drawing after 7 years of staying away from comics and art in general.
I began to do Google searches on the Internet, of which I was extremely new to (yeah, call me a Dinosaur, but I started late), on Christian Comics, And stumbled upon websites like The Megazeen. Artists like Psycho Ann, Jamie Cosley and Drew Pocza. And immediately, I was hooked and revitalized. The art and comics I saw from just those sites and Artists revived my desires to get back into drawing again.

So I began to create a few comic strips and drawings and began to make the rounds to get myself noticed. But after doing so, I began to feel that urge of working on something that was my own. Mainly a Superhero Character. So I began to pray about it and started to think what it was I wanted to draw. 

I do admit the first Character to come to mind was Warrior Pig. And I gave it some good thought. But for whatever reason, I wasn't really feeling it. I did want to work on a the idea of a cartoonish animal character, but not Warrior Pig.

So one day, I sat down to do a sketch. I think it was on break at work, or maybe after work when I got Home. Anyway, it was one simple sketch, and there it was. One simple sketch is all it took.

The sketch was similar to Doomsday Dog, but instead of being a parody of Daredevil, he was an original creation. The halo on the shirt was the selling point. Now all I needed was a name. And that was not even the hard part. The name just naturally came. The halo said it all. So I thought of Dog Saint. I was so hooked with not only the Character, but the name itself.

My first sketch of Dog Saint was not all that good though. For starters, instead of resembling a dog, Dog Saint looked more like a teddy bear. So for a moment I considered going with the bear thing, and so I thought, "Bear Saint?", "Saint Bear?", "Grizzly Saint?". Well, it really didn't take long for me to dump that idea. So I went to do another sketch of the Character. This time I purposed myself to try and make him look like a dog instead of a bear. 

During that time I was working on setting up my website Eric Merced.com for the first time. So I decided to place Dog Saint right on my main page. This way, everyone who would visit my website would see him.

I got some great feedback from allot of Folks who saw that picture. And so I knew I had to get moving and write up a story and draw a comic on this Character.

That's when I created the first Dog Saint story, "Sewer Rats".

More on that next post ;)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »