Enter: Ben Torres |

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the trade paperback of Knight Watchman: Graveyard Shift is currently available at Amazon.com for a measly $8.09 (plus shipping). This book collects the four issue mini-series originally published by Image Comics, written by myself and Chris Ecker and featuring the fabulous art of Ben Torres.

Ben’s career as a designer began at the Hasbro Toy Group, working on Star Wars, GI Joe, Batman, Starting Line Up, Pokemon, Aliens, Predator, Monsters Inc, Planet of the Apes and others. He also served as creative consultant on various television series such as GI Joe, Vortech and Transformers and contributed concept designs and story content for movies such as Star Wars, Men In Black and Jurassic Park.

As far as I know, Ben’s comic book career started right here at Big Bang Comics. Actually, it began with the pre-Big Bang story Brother Hood, the back-up feature in 1993’s Berzerker #4 which evolved into Graveyard Shift.

The first two issues of Graveyard Shift were published by Caliber Press, but the series was interrupted by our move over to Image Comics. Those first two issues were reissued by Image with new covers and back-up stories. The series concluded with issues 3 and 4 which contained all new material.

I thought I’d use this blog post to share some of Ben’s Knight Watchman pieces that are not reprinted in the Graveyard Shift trade paperback. These include the original two covers to the Caliber Press issues, a presentation piece and a drawing that he gave to me.

Also presented here today are Ben’s two original KW sample pages, which have never appeared anywhere except for one figure used in an ad. You will notice that KW’s uniform features the second (unused) version of the chest logo, the black shield with the eyeball on it. It’s also either the grown-up Galahad in the Watchman suit, or more likely just drawn before we decided that the older Reid Randall would be more massive than his junior partner.