My ex-wife is a card-carrying witch. She fancies herself a hedge witch, which means a solitary, standing between her village and the outside world like a hedge. She taught me a lot about magic, and while I don’t believe in it (though I made every effort to), I was fascinated by the lore.

When we were together, we had been working on a book. It was her idea, but I took the characters, added some more detail, and told the story. The novel has two interludes to tell you what happened while they attended a small, Midwestern, liberal arts college like no one I know.

Something I learned about witchcraft or paganism from my ex was that witches had an affinity for one of the elements (air, fire, water, or earth), and that each of the elements has a corresponding color. I did drawings like these before ten years ago, and I wanted to update them for fun. This is most of the 2014 collection:

This is what I just did:

First, we have Jin Harima, a phonomancer, which means sound, preferably music, powers his magic.

This is Regina de Costa, the Secret Princess of the United States, run away from home.

Susan Young is a track star from Gary, Indiana. She’s not really into all this witchy stuff, but she is endlessly fascinated by Regina and will do anything she says.

And finally, Victor Huber, a farmboy and Regina’s protégé.

I haven’t really thought about them since I published their novel three years ago, but this was a nice trip down memory lane.

According to a philosopher named Giambattista Vico, there are three ages of mankind. In order, they are the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of men. I wanted to use this, in reverse order as a framework for three action comics that I would create. The first would be a grounded vigilante story, the second one a straight-up superhero epic, and the third one would bring the first two together in a unified vision of mythology (i.e. all the gods we know from legend are based on the same five beings).

This guy, the hero in the second book and one of the heroes of the third, is a demi-god. He has super-strength, so he wears a metal suit (and pants because he would look ridiculous in a onesie), and he gets around by leaping (the funky boots keep him from smashing the street when he lands).

When I developed him in the late nineties, early aughts, there were no gay superheroes, and that would have made him unique. His nationality is Mexican-American, which wasn’t necessarily unique back then, but it was definitely rare.

Unfortunately, all of the writing I did with the character was lost because Newcastle kept sitting on my laptop twenty years ago. The first image I did this week, using the black, white, and red style. The second I did in 2003, when I became more sure of my skill.