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.

Either way, once we saw Ben’s take on the character we knew that we had to do the mini-series.

Knight Watchman: Graveyard Shift is available at Amazon.com at: http://www.amazon.com/Knight-Watchman-Graveyard-Chris-Ecker/dp/1481885340/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370392185&sr=8-1&

When Chris Ecker and I first created Big Bang Comics about twenty years ago, some of our earliest champions were Golden Age comics legends Mart Nodell and Shelly Moldoff. Both were kind enough to provide covers for our early issues and appreciated the homages that we were creating. My wife Margie attended most comic conventions with me and we always enjoyed spending time before the day’s activities visiting and catching up with Shelly and his wife Shirley. Chris was friends with Mart and Carrie Nodell and I got to know those wonderful folks through him.

Carrie Nodell was a wonderful, sweet lady and she always referred to us and Big Bang Comics as simply “The Bang” and Chris and I started to refer to the project that way and still do after all these years. When I decided to start a blog featuring unpublished art and stories from Big Bang and Megaton, I never had any doubt as to what to call it.

Mart and Carrie and Shelley and Shirley are all gone now and I miss seeing them at comic shows. As an “old guy” now 20+ years on, I have even more respect for how hard they worked at those shows and for the fun and enthusiasm they generated. This blog is dedicated to their memory and spirit.

What can you expect from this blog? I’d like it to be a companion to my two websites: www.megatoncomics.com and www.bigbangcomics.com . If you’re not familiar with them or my work you might want to check them out. Over the years there’s been a lot of work that didn’t make it into the books, and I’ll be sharing some of it here. Sketches, covers, complete comic stories, character designs, even scripts.

I’d like to encourage any of the artists and writers who were part of the gang over the years to comment, submit art and/or their recollections about the good old days (or not so good, if that’s the case). Hopefully they will not mind me sharing some of their old work here.

Next time: Graveyard Shift