Brian Moore's Sketchblog

In the spring and summer of 2004 I worked on a slightly unusual comics project, “The Big Wheel.” It was a story featuring characters from an animated series I had started in 2000, Teddy & Anna. It was the first sustained comics story I’d done since high school. And it was drawn, in ink and marker, on sheets of paper that were about 4 1/2 feet tall by 3 1/2 wide, for display in a window space in downtown Lowell. I’d go down there when a new page was done, take down the old one and put up the new.

It was tremendous fun to do. I made up the story as I went along, figuring out what would happen on the next page midway through the page I was drawing. I drew a minor character into a few panels and figured out later that he’d have to be one of the villains. The story was vaguely steampunk-y, with clockwork robots, pennyfarthing bicycles, airships, and a Tesla coil (the Big Wheel, a weapon developed by a secret society called the Electric Victorians.)

It was also pretty exhausting to make, and I got behind schedule pretty quickly. Then I got married to my lovely wife and went away on the honeymoon and by then the next exhibit scheduled for the windows space had to go in, so the story stopped on a cliffhanger with our heroes’ airship under attack. Someday I hope to finish up the story and find a new display venue for it (or at least take photos and publish it here.)

I made a “production blog” as I worked on the pages, so that anybody that saw them in the window could go home and look up how that day’s page had been made. I did a lot of research for the story (on airships, Tesla coils, early aviation, Victorian dress, etc.) so that’s the bulk of the blog entries, but there’s also some silly stuff. I’ve copied the entire blog into one big entry, for posterity.