Full Circle

I got an impending-FedEx e-mail notice from Marvel yesterday. This is always a mystery...what will I receive tomorrow? The results are sometimes expected and sometimes out of the blue, since I worked on a lot of books over the years and don't pay close attention to what is being reprinted at any given time.

This reprinted Fantastic Four Marvel Masterworks showed up in my mailbox a few minutes ago.

And took me right back...in 2005, I color-reconstructed six issues of this book from my iBook while alternating living in Murchison Falls, Uganda, with Bunga, near Kabalagala and Kampala.

I fled some unpleasantness to Swakopmund, where I finished the issues in Namibia. I spent every afternoon in the town I-Cafe uploading files. Slowly, slowly. The Internet wasn't so fast back then. I celebrated finishing by going to see an FF movie in the town cinema. I was the only one cackling when Stan Lee was on-screen.

If any of this sounds familiar, that's because we did all this here on the blog. I don't know how many readers from 2005 are still with me...blog readership suffered a precipitous drop once Facebook and Twitter caught on, but here we were, in 2005. Making comic books from our laptop in Africa before heading to Kuwait to make more comics.