Issue 18 is now up and in this issue we learn the origin of Cat, how he came to the Earth and who he merged with in order to survive on our world.
Issue 18 - here's the link
One of the things that I wanted to work in was to have a setting in Lake George, New York. For those not familiar, Lake George is a vacation/resort destination and when I was a child my family and I would go there for the July 4th weekend every year.
I created my characters when I was in fifth grade, about three weeks before the school year ended, but I didn't draw them right away - I spent the first three weeks deciding what they should look like, their powers and their stories. Then when school let out, I brought a pad of paper and some Crayola markers on vacation with us to Lake George and at nights, when we were done going out for the day, I drew my characters for the first time.
It was on a return trip to Lake George in 2012 that I decided to do something with my characters and that set me off on a long path that led to the current series, which debuted in 2018. So it seemed only fitting that I make that location where the Ultra-Elite Team held their first meeting.
Once I created my team, I didn't produce comics with them like I do now. Instead I drew full page pictures and then just wrote stories about them. While I still have those pictures, many don't fit into the stories I tell today, but maybe some day I'll post them. Anyway, there was one - it was a picture I drew in eight grade which showed Cat in his spaceship coming to Earth. It was just ink on paper with no color, but I decided to colorize it and include it in this issue. As of now, this is the only original drawing I did that I plan to pull into the current series. The picture below is the colorized version (no artwork was edited from the original version):
