Deadlands: A Comic By Dan Phillips and Tom Travers

As promised, here is the very first original comic I ever created alongside my pal and frequent artistic collaborator, Tom Travers. It’s called Deadlands, it’s a ten-page post-apocalyptic short, and as the first bit of sequential storytelling we ever tackled, I think it’s not too shabby. Hopefully you enjoy it.

A little background on the creation of Deadlands for those interested: the story was originally conceived as an open-ended vehicle for Tom and I to cut our teeth on, kind of like a loose chord structure for musicians to jam over and practice their chops. I came up with a general outline for the story’s world, conceived the set-up and then Tom and I just dove right in with reckless abandon. The idea was to keep going with ten page installments until Tom and I grew bored with the story and/or decided to move on.

As it turned out, neither Tom nor I ever grew bored with Deadlands (we even got about 98 percent through a second installment), but life, day jobs and scheduling did catch up to us, and by the time we were able to get back together to collaborate again, we decided to leave Deadlands as it stands: a delightfully weird, violent little short we came up with when we were too young, naive and ballsy enough to know how hard it was to churn out a serialized comic book. Even though it ends on a cliffhanger, I still think it stands on its own pretty well – kind of like one of those 2000AD or Heavy Metal serials that were canned before they even got past a couple installments.

Obviously, this being a product of two younger, less experienced versions of ourselves, there are a few things about the mechanics of this story that make me wince when I look back at them today. But that’s the nature of creativity. If you ever look at something you did a few years ago and don’t see the mistakes, it’s time to pack it in. Anyway, without further ado, here’s Deadlands. Again, I hope you dig, and as always, pass it on to your friends.

WARNING: Being new at this blog thing, I couldn’t quite figure out how to post the pages at a reasonable size while making sure they were still readable. After screwing around with blogger for a while, I figured the best solution was to just post each file at their actual sizes and resolution. The result isn’t ideal, but it will allow you to read the pages on a desktop or laptop. You might be shit out of luck if you’re on a mobile device. Sorry. I’ll figure this fucking technology thing out eventually. Anyway, expect things to get BIG after the page jump.