There have been a number of projects with which I’ve been involved that haven’t really panned out.  Reasons for this vary, from simple lack of enthusiasm to too many similarities to other projects.  Most of the time I can take these ideas and wrap them into the creative concepts that will pan out, but this is one that kind of dead-ended.

The premise came from my friends and frequent creative collaborative partner, Brandon Combs who is now pretty busy with Glitz and Grime.  During one of our many editing/review sessions he brought up how twisted the Wizard of Oz story really is and how much fun a darker, psychotic version would be.  We planned to use his unconventional story-telling and my artwork to create a graphic novel using the base story and producing it.  Unfortunately right after we began developing the concept “Weird Oz” hit everywhere.  McFarlane Toys began to produce it’s own line, various comics, books, and TV shows started to riff on it, and we both decided we would like like we were the soft, backing iron on the blade instead of the cutting edge.  So we dropped it.  Fortunately I still have the artwork and with the new “Oz: The Great and Powerful” film coming out I thought it was a good time to share:

Maybe someday I can finish concepts on these just for fun, but I hope they still show that the idea was a little cutting edge when we came up with it!