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THE COMIC Corner the Maze is an urban fantasy comic following Chimalli RamÃrez, a racing driver who has found himself stranded in another dimension after veering off track during a sudden rain storm. He's still not sure whether he hit the wall or actually went through the strange glowing green portal, but either way, he's determined to fight his way back home and finish the race. "A racecar driver is stranded in another dimension and must battle his way back home." In a way, the ideas of Corner the Maze came from earlier than that. The aforementioned novel series is something I've been working on off-and-on again since I was ten years old, and that's where the cosmology, villains, and many of the background characters for the comic come from. As far as the portal thing goes, I had a fairly detailed idea down about somebody who accidentally rode a train through a portal to the Otherworld back in 2007, after going on a long train trip to New Mexico -- but nothing ever came of that, both because it had a lot of issues (such as, what to do with all those other people on the train who weren't in the story?), and because I just hadn't learned how to plot a whole story back then. The core idea here is similar, but there's very little in common with that early idea otherwise. The story went through a couple of re-writes before you see it here, but it was essentially the same ever since I started actually writing it. It's mostly the details that changed; the prologue originally took place during qualifying instead of a race, and our hero was racing in several specific series before I decided it was best to leave it vague. As will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well, the characters (who hadn't already made an appearance elsewhere in my writing) also all went through several name changes before the end! Update Schedule: Corner the Maze updates twice weekly on Tuesday and Thursday, and an update hasn't been missed yet! Process: I had the whole thing outlined and mostly scripted at the start of the project. I then go through and thumbnail it in a sketchbook in clumps of several chapters; once that's done, I pencil it out on 11x17 comic board, and ink over the pencils before scanning the pages into the computer and adding speech bubbles there. I like working traditionally, but believe me, you don't want to see my lettering! THE CREATOR
I live in Michigan with my mother, my brother (a photographer), and our three* cats. When I'm not working on this comic or writing, I do web design, illustrate, and race karts. * Three when the comic was made. Shale (pictured), my special kitty and constant companion during the making of Corner the Maze, died in September of 2021. You can find me on: Twitter | Facebook |
This was the one-sentence summary I started plotting Corner the Maze with, in the start of spring 2016. That's not where it all started, but that was when the real plot of the comic started to take shape. Before that, it was little more than a single page in my sketchbook where (for whatever reason) I had decided to draw a racing driver and his car against the backdrop of the Otherworld from my ongoing novel projects. I completed that drawing at about the same time that I wrote that first sentence, and it became the cover to Volume I.
There are three things I've been doing practically since I can remember: reading, playing computer games, and drawing. Writing is something that I came to enjoy much later, around the time I realised that I could write stories on the computer -- around age ten, when I had something more than Word Perfect to work with. Writing long-hand has always been a struggle for me, so I avoid it. Despite dabbling a good bit with painting and digital art, especially in recent years, drawing is still my favourite way to do art, and pen and ink playing to that. How much of that is because it comes naturally and how much of it is because of my love of old RPG book illustrations and black-and-white comic book art is anyone's guess, but there's probably some of both of that.