When will you meet Mr. Smith?

The first story I ever did in comics was a 5 page short story about a man who at first appears to be a typical hired assassin named Mr. Smith. It was originally done for a horror and noir comics contest- the winner would be published as a backup feature. A story about a murderous teddy bear won.

My art, being my first real attempt at drawing comics, is rather crude but the story by James Hitchcock is a very dark and haunting take on what it means to be trapped by fate in a situation you despise but can't seem to break free of. I had planned to add in some spotted blacks in Photoshop, being afraid to cover up the line work with a short deadline and not wanting to have to draw lost details if I didn't like the results, but I just ended up over-shading the whole thing a sort of muddy middle grey which sort of captures the moral ambivalence I suppose but didn't nearly do enough justice to Jim's awesome script. It really deserved some dense blacks to portray the bleak and grim emotional vibe of the story.

After we lost the contest we decided to not let the story go to waste and that's when we jumped into self-publishing, creating the Red Flag Publishing empire and launching our Red Flags anthology with a first issue that contained the full "Mr. Smith" story along with the first part of a longer story which has yet to be completed called "Snatched" in which an FBI agent and a reporter investigate a series of mysterious child abductions. The second issue of Red Flags was published on-line at Web Comics Nation (and can be located with the link at the top right corner of the sidebar on this page).

You can read the Mr. Smith story for free by clicking here.