Sean Huxter - The Early Years

I've been drawing since I could hold a pencil. I've never been amazing at it, but I get by. When I put my mind and hand to it I can render up some nice stuff, but I generally just don't want to. But the comic bug has been with me for as long as I can remember. Here is some of my early work.

In somewhere around Grade Six I used to frequent a corner store close to my school, in which worked a friend of mine who used to doodle and sketch incessantly on bits of cardboard that came from the chocolate bar boxes, or other boxes of store stock. I would join him. I used my first .5 mechanical pencil there. Here is one surviving piece I did when I couldn't have been older than ten. You should easily be able to see the influence of Space: 1999, which I used to watch avidly at the time.

In my early teens I had a renewed interest in space cartoons, and did a few of my own. Here's a sheet from one of my many comics I did at the time. At the time I had a renewed interest in Thunderbirds because the film Thunderbirds Are Go! came to my little town. I remembered the beloved TV series, and I wanted to write fan fiction based on it. I created my own little set of characters closely based on the Thunderbirds characters. I called this comic Firebirds.

In 1977 Star Wars came out, and like many, it had a huge influence on my life. Also, at the time, I was reading Micronauts comic books. I did a bunch of stories based on characters I created which were loosely based on characters from both of those universes, as well as others. Here's just one sheet from one story, a rare one I colored with colored pencils.

At the time I actually had a serial published in the local newspaper in my home town. I approached the editor and he agreed to publish my cartoon. I have some of the original paste-ups which I have yet to scan, but I will. I drew the strip in ink, and penciled in the text. Then he had the text typeset and glued into the balloons.

Oh, and for good measure, here's a little wizard guy I created. I did a Commodore 64 graphic of this little guy for a LoadStar contest, and I won. (The paper got wet sometime during storage and the red ink ran on the upper left.

Before I did Modern Ways I tried my hand at a comic strip based on aliens setting out on an expedition to Earth. I originally did them in marker on standard paper. I even brought the strip to the Newfoundland Herald editor who was kind, patient, looked them over, but rejected them. He had kind words of encouragement to say, and I took them to heart. My work on Modern Ways would probably never have gotten off the ground if I had been laughed at or otherwise discouraged.

I revamped the strip using a larger and more formal comic strip format. A couple of samples of the finished product:

I was pretty young... and not overly funny now that I see them again.