Extinction lasts forever. Most of the time.
Sometimes you find things that you thought had been lost or even worse–totally gone for ohhhh…twenty plus years.
Abby’s Menagerie is the story of Abby Wilson, a zookeeper who gets caught up in a series of fantastic occurrences. Animals long believed to be extinct suddenly begin reappearing … and Abby was somehow at the center of the whole phenomenon.
We had a lot of support for a lot of great comic people, Zoo’s, zookeepers and it was a wonderful time!
Abby’s Menagerie and Barry ‘s Damnation Gambit, along with amazing creators like Steve Conley ‘s groundbreaking Astounding Space Thrills, and Shannon Denton were some of the first creators to have comics on this new fangled thing called–The Web.
To cut a long and very sad story short– one massive hard drive crash, a total website destruction/deletion, no backups, and there being no such thing as “the cloud” back then–Abby was gone.
The fact that nothing remained of Abby ate me alive for years.
Seriously…YeArS!
Everything we had done was lost. Even archive.org only had a fragmented page or two.
AM was indeed thing of the past.
Extinct
Or so we thought!
While going through boxes accumulated over the years (it’s better you don’t ask) I came across some CD’s. Abby is on TWO! of the CD’s I found!!
For right now, no high res files exist–ONLY low res files–well, I’m still going thru stuff and there’s a couple things that say high rez, but because they are low rez there is probably no way to bring them to print and have them look remotely alright.
I have a lot of original art pages. Some art I gave away, some I sold, but I still have quite a bit of the original hand-drawn art.
With all the freelance stuff I’m currently involved in, photography projects, books I want to write, I don’t think I’ll go back and redo those.
I also believe in moving on.
Will I restart Abby’s Menagerie? I certainly ain’t sayin’ no. But I have to tell ya, I’m in sooo much of a better place knowing it this story wasn’t lost.
So…I’ll be posting the pages probably a couple times a week on my web site, Facebook and Instagram. The art is…rough. It’s painfully cringy to go back and look at things you did decades ago.
But AM had heart and it meant and means the world to me.
Plus…I got to do something I love–draw extinct animals!!
Here’s the first 4 pages to get you started!
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