A Fistful of Pain Update - The Art of Louie Joyce
Seriously: I dare you not to fall in love with Louie's work!
Have you seen the artwork of Louie Joyce? Check it here on our latest Kickstarter…or read on.
The man is a superstar. He layers emotion, he structures sublime storytelling, and his kinetic motion is a delight on your eyeballs. He’s a comic storyteller who can do it all.
I first worked with Louie on an 8 page short story called THE MANY HAROLD HOLTS OF SPACE AND TIME.
It’s a ridiculous short about our Australian Prime Minister who went missing while swimming in the ocean one day [true story] and people had many conspiracy theories over the coming decades [most false, we assume] so I decided to write a short where every single one of those theories all happened at once because space/time broke when Holt went missing, so we get Russian defector Holt, and Atlantic diplomat Holt, and alien abducted Holt [all great fun]. I figured if we could have the national sense of humour to name a swimming pool after Holt, then we could tell this story.
So imagine my insane delight when I partner with Louie and this is the first page he submits:
I was going for a little ALL STAR SUPERMAN Quitely/Morrison riff on a four panel intro page that gives you everything you need. Louie absolutely smashes this by making it his own - the composition, the water, the hazy sunset colours. Brilliant.
But I also remember the layout on this page blew me away:
And the colours and design on this page:
I mean, this was a decade ago, and ever since then all I’ve wanted to do is make comics with Louie Joyce.
I’m lucky to have Louie live fairly close to my neck of the woods, so we catch up at conventions as often as we can.
After one con day, we even got to go to the Ledger awards together where we both took home some wooden glory for our books - which was just an awesome night!
Even the pandemic couldn’t keep us apart - and I always request to sit with my guy because there’s no better way to go through a weekend than chatting comics and watching him draw.
At every show we talk about old back issue comics we find, and we talk about our families, and we just hang. I get to watch him sketch commissions, and marvel at his art on the wall.
I mean, c’mon, look at what he’s capable of:
I’ve even taught his art in class. You’ve maybe even read his work in these amazing books:
The guy is a wild talent, and so we’ve also spent this time talking about collaborating, and secretly hustling something together all this time. Louie would crack out his tablet at a con, I’d gather in closely and just completely nerd out over the latest thumbnails or character designs he’d been cooking up.
What Louie and I have been building for…9 years has been this comic: A FISTFUL OF PAIN.
As this graphic novella has come together, I have watched Louie refine his work, and dive further into his passions, and the results are on every single page of this comic. I am so excited to share the page with Louie, and share his work with everyone, and just have the chance to see more Louie work in the wild.
Louie and I made the design to go with a more European sized comic page, to give him more room to spread his beauty, and this comic genuinely has something masterful on every single page. Every. Single. Page.
You are going to love this latest secondary evolution in Louie’s artwork, so thanks for joining us and making this campaign one of the most successful ComixTribe launches ever - in every possible metric we can count, but most importantly in helping two mates make an absolutely stellar comic that we cannot wait to share with you.