Comics Artopsy #11
Early Stage Psychotic Disorder or: How I invented The Matrix before 1999. Twice!
Hi everyone,
As another month goes by, another Artopsy comes along. I hope everyone’s having an amazing Friday. Or just the best possible one. That would be fine, too. Just to be sure, let’s check the news to verify that nothing totally insane happened yet today….
Okay, just the usual, so let’s carry on!
Welcome to another entry about my craft. This one will be especially humbling as I will be showing very, VERY early work. In fact, some of the following pages are the very first sequential pages I ever did. Also included, the very first time I ever “inked” my drawings, so thanks in advance for indulging me.
As I mentioned in past installments, I started to become interested in the possibility of making comics a professional career choice at a rather late age. I’d spent the bulk of my teenage years trying to become a rock musician. I was playing the drums with a rock band and I really thought we could someday become professionals. Like a lot of kids back in the days.
It was the early 90s in Quebec, Canada. A ton of young people were playing electric guitar, bass and drums, having fun and trying to become rock virtuosos. It was the Metallica/Nirvana years, and there were bands everywhere. But, at 20 years old, I realized I was just an average drummer. I had many drumming friends who were better than I, and I thought that if I couldn’t really stand out from the lot, maybe I should do something else.
One thing I was especially good at was drawing. I didn’t practice a lot but I really enjoyed it. This was also the time when I discovered adult comics like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and DC’s Vertigo imprint, as well as all of the European comics. So it became my new goal: to be a comics artist.
And here are my first consecutive pages, done in 1996. At the time, I was reading a lot of science fiction authors like Asimov, Philip K. Dick, A.E. Van Vogt and such. I was soaked with science fiction themes and I wanted to do a small story where the hero wakes up from a virtual reality world, like the Matrix, and is rescued by a bunch of rebels (on the last page) who are trying to cope with the harsh reality of the world.
Basically, this reality is a desert with super advanced technological devices to keep people plugged in. Obviously, I didn’t call it “the Matrix,” but I think these kinds of ideas were circulating everywhere. There were already a lot of books, comics and movies that dealt with virtual reality. The Matrix was just the one to really put the theme “on the map” with a superb movie. I still remember seeing it and thinking something like: “Hey! That’s exactly the movie I wanted people to do. And they did it great!”
So, if it wasn’t clear, the hero of the story is casually taking the bus on his way to work when he realizes that everyone on board is sleeping, even the driver. Following this “glitch,” he hears a voice in his head, gets angry and wakes up in some kind of virtual reality pod. He furiously punches the poor technician—who probably didn’t deserve to be treated so badly—and finally escapes. The last page is the rebel team that is trying to find this escaped man.
It’s funny how I can see some visual patterns I was using back then and which I still use today…
Following my first ever pages, I did another virtual reality story. But this time, both the “virtual” and the “real” world are science fiction. Sorry, it’s obviously in French, but I assure you, you’re not missing out on any Victor Hugo-level prose here…
Basically, the same dude as in the previous story (but with a robot this time!) is having problems with his spaceship and is forced to crash on a nearby planet. Innovative start, no?
Actually, the spaceship doesn’t exactly crash, so much as it slips on a giant banana peel (sorry). The dude and the robot end up meeting a bunch of “caterpillar hunters,” which are then attacked by the caterpillars that happen to be giant-sized. The hero is killed by a caterpillar and then also dies on his virtual reality chair. Because, obviously, as we all know: If you get killed in The Matrix, you die for real, too.
These next pages were done much later, during my time as a student in a Belgium illustration/art school, around the year 2000…
[Brian here, hoping all of my fellow Yanks are staying out of the malls this Black Friday. Anyway, how amazing is it to see the quantum leaps Niko and his artwork made with each new story? We’re saving the very best of his early work for you generous paid subscribers in the Tower right after this paywall, and we’ll see the rest of you on Monday for some more free Spectators, thanks!]