Dragon Rider

So in the final bit of commentary on the art in my YouTube intro video, we take a look at the

comic I drew as a high school freshman that was shown in there: Dragon Rider.

Now when I drew comics in high school,  I was doing whatever came to me with pencil on paper. No script, no Bristol board, no rulers, usually no design sketches done beforehand...it was just me putting whatever came out of my head on to the page.

One of two things tended to happen with those comics: either I'd find something in it I'd like and keep going with it, creating a lot of pages and a fully fleshed out story (though I almost never finished a whole story) or I'd get a few pages in, realize this wasn't happening, and move on to something else.

The later was the case with Dragon Rider. I got three pages in on this one, quitting on the final panel of page three. Hence, why I chose it for the video.  I wasn't really looking to show properties I had any intention of using other then College Follies.

It was one of the few fantasy comics I've done. The premise is that there is a series of mountaintop cities above the clouds. Their defenders are knights who ride dragons, so they're called...you guessed it...Dragon Riders.

I only used the first two panels of it in the video because they required minimal clean up and had the smallest amount of embarrassing dialog. I'm including the rest here for the sake of illustrating what I'm talking about. They're presented here with no touch up, so I apologize for their crudeness (I didn't even draw the hero holding his hammer correctly in the third panel, shown below!).

 This is by no means a good comic. If you want to try and read the dialog feel free, but  essentially it opens with a blacksmith named Abraham (yeah, horrible name) in his shop complaining to his friend and Dragon Rider, Sirus, about his lot in life. He whines about a girl he likes named Tala who seems real cozy with a Dragon Rider. Then the city is attacked by dragons on the final panel.

Had it continued, Abraham would've had to go on a quest to fight the attackers and save Tala, while becoming a Dragon Rider himself. It was very typical stuff, with lots of asinine dialog and a type of story I'd beaten to death already, so I didn't go any further with it.

I haven't thought about it in the years since until I put it in the video. That did get the wheels turning. I do have an idea of how I could turn into a decent story if I ever found a fantasy-style comic artist to illustrate it. Though if that ever happens, old Abraham is definitely getting  a
                                                                          new name.

I have no desire to do a comic with a character named Abe the Barbarian.