WHO IS ... EL GORGO!?! ... PART ONE

So anybody who stumbles upon this blog is going to see the phrase "El Gorgo!" a lot. "What's an El Gorgo?" you may ask. El Gorgo! is a brand new online comic book written by Mike McGee and drawn by me. The first issue is available entirely for free at the afore-linked website in your choice of JPEG images, PDF, or Comic Book Archive (.CBR) formats.

You should go and read it. Right now. I'm sure you'll have questions when you're done. It's OK. I'll wait.

Done? All right then ...

So how did El Gorgo! begin? Where did we come up with this crazy thing?

It all started way back in March of 2007. One of Mike's online associates was planning a comics anthology and was soliciting 22-page stories. At the time we were spinning our wheels trying to develop a full-length horror graphic novel, and the anthology seemed like a nice break from development hell.

So on an unusually warm Sunday afternoon (warm for Cleveland, OH, anyway), I got to thinking about what we could possibly do. The first idea I had was a throwaway story set in the 1940s/1950s about a Luchador superhero and his intelligent luchador gorilla sidekick fighting a giant robot. So I called up Mike to pitch the idea to him.

"I like the luchador gorilla better. We should do a story about him." he said.

And then over the next hour or so, we rapidly hashed out the basic concept of El Gorgo! I came up with the name (more like randomly went with the first thing that popped into my head), and Mike quickly fleshed out his personality. El Gorgo was a genius, and played in a surf-rock band. We both immediately knew we wanted to do this as a Silver-Age-style book: all-ages, high energy, big, crazy cosmic ideas ... The immediate motto for the book became "If an idea seems too outrageous, it's not outrageous enough.

We started hashing out the story. I randomly threw out the idea that he should be transported into the future to fight cyborg dinosaurs, and that we should begin in the middle of a story, as though it was an established comic. That was pretty much the extent of my contribution to the writing, and the rest has been all Mike. At one point we considered having the story be set firmly in the 1960s, with El Gorgo meeting his "future" counterpart from the present-day, more inspired by Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. That idea quickly went out the window.

I rushed to my trusty iMac and created the first concept sketch of El Gorgo! while doing my best Jack Kirby impersonation:



As I worked up the sketch, Mike came up with the idea that El Gorgo would be fighting the Deep Ones and Dagon (very loosely based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft) in the beginning of the story, and then be transported mysteriously to Titan to fight dinosaurs.

We had a concept. We had a story. It was time to get to work.

To be continued ...