Back when I was in college I drew a comic for the Daily Texan (UT-Austin’s paper) called Fists: Free For All. My original premise, inspired by Krazy Kat and not too different from my current ATTACKS series now that I think about it, was to have each strip end with (or revolve around) one character hurling a gloved fist on a stick at another. Although I quickly abandoned that concept, I did, over the years, develop a set of regular characters and images that I kept coming back to, like the previously mentioned flying fists, a weird metal bat creature, the cigar-smoking frog, masks, and suited men who had to hold up their own lower jaws on a stick. After I graduated from college and got into Fort Thunder, my style changed pretty rapidly, and abandoned all of these characters except for, of course, the cigar-smoking Frog.

However, this past week, my buddy Natalia Ciolko asked me to do a two-page comic for the next issue of her zine Smear Campaign, and she was already reprinting some old FISTS strips, so I decided to do a whole new one.

Here’s the first page (I’ll have the second one up Friday):