In the early-to-mid 90s Vampirella made something of a comeback in regular comics. At a New York convention I met Harris Comics's editor in chief, Melony Crawford Chadwick and pitched her an off-the-top-of-my-head idea: cyborg vampires from the future vs Vampirella. There was more to it than that, but that was all just details. It was an immediately green lit and I started writing it and it became something I was really proud of; it was certainly smarter than I thought it would be and I made up some really weird bad ass shit that would have been an absolute blast to draw; I had one scene where one of those cyborg vampires was speeding down a busy NY street on a hoverbike against traffic smashing Vampi into the windshields of the cars as he passed by.
The decision was made that there should be some sort of "zero" issue to help promote it. I figured I could play with a time stream cop character I created for the mini, a shark-toothed, dread-locked alien I named Bleak. I had just finished my one issue of Malibu's Rune and had a lot of that character in my head and hands, which explains the similarity of a few superficial elements (big mouth & weird jewelry), but I really dug the boots I designed for him.
So, here's Bleak and his Cthulhoid dog monitoring "Shimmerspace" -- I concocted an alternate dimension cloudscape that somehow was a nexus for all timelines and could be used to track disturbances in those timelines.
Dunno why, but I felt that the dog wouldn't really like Shimmerspace and had it throwing up on the deck of Bleak's ship. The weird monocled face on the screen in the second panel was the new incarnation of The Rook -- a recently revamped character and a time-traveller of sorts in the Harris Comics line. The idea being that Bleak was tracking someone in the "present" of the comics universe.
The two reverse tornadoes rising up and converging on Bleak were to indicate two alternate time lines being messed with by the events about to transpire in the upcoming mini-series.
Sadly, while starting to draw the next two pages, a double spread, I got the call that Crawford Chadwick was fired and all unsolicited books were on hold, which really meant they were cancelled.
The genesis for the cyborg vampires from the future came from another dead project. I had pitched the idea to the then editor of Blade as a fill in; the future these vampires came from was a radioactive hell so they had to travel back in time to obtain the uncontaminated blood they needed to survive. I managed to write the script before the series was cancelled. The last issue was the one my story was schedule to run, so I understood when the editor chose to give it to the main creative team.
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