As a reminder that I didn’t always make weirdo abstract comics, here is a gallery of pages I made back in 2007 when I was attached to Henrik Rehr’s Terrorist book(at that point called Trigger) as an artist. The pages, in various stages of the process from pencil rough to inks, are presented here in order:
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- Page 6; the only inked page in the sequence. Here we see the birth of prince Franz Ferdinand, and the beginning of events that would make him heir apparent.
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- Page 7. Note that panel 2 would have been a repetition of panel two from the previos page.
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- Page 8.
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- Page 9. The birth and baptism of Gavrilo Princip. Spoilers: he’ll grow up to assassinate the baby born on page 6.
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- Page 10.
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- Page 11.
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- Page 12.
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- Page 13
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- Page 14
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- Page 15. A montage of the war rumblings of the early 20th century Austrian empire. You’ll note how little I cared for drawing cannons in this rough.
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- Page 16. My enthusiasm lay much more with the grandfather’s stories around the fire.
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- Page 17.
These pages were produced to apply for a work grant to support me while I worked on the ~250 pages long graphic novel about the 1917 Sarajevo assassination. When the application was declined, and as it dawned on me how much research would actually be required, my enthusiasm puttered out and I eventually threw in the towel on a project that had been planned for a year and a half at that point. To be honest, I was still smarting after spending six years on my first graphic novel, and I probably couldn’t have done another massive undertaking so soon after.
Eventually, Henrik drew the book himself, and it has since been published in eight languages that I know of. It wasn’t until recently, however, that a friend asked me if I had heard about the book, and I could reply with a grin that I knew it way back from before the last draft was written. So I dug out these from my archives, and here they are for your comparison: the Terrorist that could have been 🙂