Negronomicon Intro

It would be fair to say that I’ve been drawing nearly my entire life. The first drawing that I can recall making was at the age of three. I had an old volume of Hans Christian Andersen stories in my bedroom closet and one day I decided to hang out in the closet, saw the book, and noticed an etched-portriat of the author on the endpaper leaf.
I found a pencil and began to copy the image on the previous blank leaf. A strange sensation came over me, a concentration that I wasn’t used to. I remembered looking at the pencil tip and hoping it didn’t dull out before I finished because I knew that if I had to get up to find a sharpener that the magic would be lost. When I finished I had a pencil drawing of Hans Christian Andersen. It wasn’t brilliant, but it was way beyond anything that a three year-old was supposed to be doing. In my memory it was comparable to a concerted effort by an adult that had never drawn before, in the third day of a life-drawing class.
My father had been reading and collecting comic books and magazines all of his life, so I was absorbing comics from my earliest days. I lost my interest in drawing for a few years, but regained it again at the age of 9 or 10 when I saw the cover of CREEPY #75 which featured a winged-demon attacking a hot-air balloon .
At the time (and I think this was a common delusion) I thought that comic books were not drawn, but stamped from a master set of image stamps, or maybe made by some drawing machine. Even though I saw the artists names sometimes listed on the page I would still fall back into the stamping delusion. Cover paintings, on the other hand, were obviously painted by an individual and seeing that painting made me want to be able to draw that image. Unfortunately the intervening 7-year period between drawing Hans Christian Andersen and wanting to draw winged-demons had robbed me of both confidence and concentration.
But… I finally had the most important thing, which was desire.
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Skip forward a few years and you would find me furiously drawing in my spiral notebooks in an attempt to deal with the boredom and bullying of high-school. The Negronomicon is a collection of the comics that I did between 1996 and 2006. What’s unique about these comics is that they were all drawn at a series of jobs in an attempt to deal with the boredom and frustration with being a Security Guard or a Customer Service Rep or an Ion-Implant Tech. With the exception of the Dog Catcher story these stories were all freehand drawn in notebooks with ballpoint pen. I had no idea when drawing any of them that there would never be so many pages collected together, but as Rupert Everett said in Dellamorte Dellamore, “Life goes on”.
-Al Frank
Austin, TX. 2010