It all started when I met Neil Smith via the Internet back in '97, when I discovered his news website The Libertarian Enterprise (
www.ncc-1776.org). I found that our political viewpoints synch up very closely so decided to get acquainted with him and see whether we could work together on some project or other. For a while Neil would feed me ideas for political cartoons and I'd draw them, and they'd turn up on The Libertarian Enterprise or
KeepAndBearArms.com and a few other places. We also talked about some syndicated comic-strip ideas but never really got started on them.
In 2001, I think, the late and sorely missed "Lux Lucre" (aka Kerry Pierson) came up with the idea of adapting Neil's first (and so far most successful) novel,
The Probability Broach, into a graphic novel. Neil and I both liked that idea so we worked up a project proposal and five sample story pages, and I shopped them around all the independent comics publishers (because we wanted to retain full ownership rights).
I wasn't able to find a publisher, and things were looking kinda bleak, but then my smarter brother Frank came to the rescue. Frank also likes the message in TPB and set up an independent publishing company in 2002 so that we could do this project.
Prior to my starting work on the TPB graphic novel, I had completed a 63-page educational comic on commission for Susan W. Wells,
A Drug War Carol, which was presented originally as a web-comic (and is still available at
www.adrugwarcarol.com). Shortly after I started working on TPB:TGN, Susan asked if I could get ADWC published in print. So I shopped it around, again got no positive response (man, I really need to get an agent), and so Frank agreed to publish ADWC under a special arrangement with Susan.
In 2005 Frank decided to expand our line a bit with some more books, including books with other creative teams besides Neil and myself. Providentially we stumbled across Mike Baron, who happens to live in the same town as Neil Smith. Mike's first comic,
Nexus, was one of my inspirations back in the early 1980s and is one reason I became an illustrator rather than a shoe salesman. Mike is one of those guys who always has several projects in the works, and two of them -- The Architect and The Hook -- looked like stories that would work for us, and Mike and his artists were agreeable to the peanuts we pay them for publishing rights.
Meanwhile Neil and his friend Rex F. May (who goes by the handle "zen redneck" on this forum) had come up with a story about an alternative Texas and the famous 1947 Roswell incident. Originally it was going to be a prose story, for which I would provide one full-page illustration per chapter, but now we've re-worked it as a graphic novel. (One of those illustrations was re-worked into the panel you can see on "page 18" of the web-comic.)
The original prose story still exists, and may be published someday -- it contains a considerable amount of detail and historical background which we've had to cut from the graphic-novel story for reasons of space. On the other hand, the character "Rattlesnake Pete" didn't exist in the original prose story. He was invented for the comic so that we could get some exposition in relatively painlessly, and as often happens in projects like this, he became such an interesting character that Neil has decided to include him in the prose version as well.
That pretty much sums up how Big Head Press and our stories came to be.