* Well I guess you'll have to click on this to read it, if you want to know anything about anything in AHT you have to read this page. I'm going to use these "Sketchbook" pages to let you know why I'm creating AHT and since I woke up at 6 am I may as well do some actual blogging, that's what I can't stand about my life and blogging, it's not enough to draw or paint the pictures, people want some kind of explanation or a funny story or witty observation. So I'm going to tell you, reader, why I'm doing this.
I love comics, I've been reading comics since I was five or six, I think the first things I read were the last couple issues of "Devil Dinosaur", the X-Men annual where they meet Arkon (great art for it's time) and the original Star Wars run with that crazy angular art. I was never a DC fan, mostly Marvel, especially the X-Men, which I got into probably around the Dark Phoenix saga (long time John Byrne fan) and the run of the Avengers around the time of Red Ronin and the Grey Gargoyle. The only DC titles I liked were Warlord, Teen Titans (George Perez!) and The Crisis on Infinite Earths oh and I was nuts for Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth.
I owe comics alot, my vocabulary was huge when I was a kid, my spelling was leaps and bounds ahead of my classmates (point of pride as a kid) it was common ground for my brother and I and my parents loved that I was reading and that it kept me quiet on long car rides to the cottage, no AC, my brother on my left side and a HUGE German Shepherd crammed in the back seat with us.
What I like best about comics is world building, I would create hundreds of characters, I would draw constantly, all my life people were saying, "You should do a comic." "Why don't you do a comic?".
The answer was easy.
I never had a story to tell. I think that as I grew older and the medium of comics became more literary I was able to start to assemble some ideas that I liked, it was the possibilities that I was seeing in the medium, Brian K. Vaughan, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Neil Gaiman, Brian Wood and others revealed more to me about world building and the medium, the comics I read as a kid were for kids, the more recent comics (graphic novels) were more for me, as I matured, my ideas matured and we arrived here in Any How Town.
Any How Town has come so quickly to me in the past couple of weeks, two things were the starting point, "the Orrow Water Bottling Plant" and our "missions" in Afghanistan and Iraq. I was reading a blog written by a soldier on his return from Iraq and it was the language the he used that struck a chord, this guy was at least ten years younger than me (I am on the cusp of turning 37) and he was describing a life I could not understand, so immediately I got stuck on the idea of boys coming back from a war. "Orrow Water" was the next idea, a water bottling plant, I'm not sure where this came from, but I knew it would be a primary industry in this world I was creating, so I bought a sketchbook and dedicated an hour or so a day to creating, "Any How Town"
*This should be the last entry you read but since blogs run upside down, you will get to this part last.
A.Shay Hahn
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