Welcome to the Birdhouse

After almost two years of working in silence on Corbie, now that it’s online and I can finally talk about it… where to begin?

Back in late 2016, I decided it was time to actually get this project I had been wanting to do off the ground. The idea of creating a superhero comic for introverts and highly sensitive people had been something I was working towards for a good five years before that, but I didn’t feel I was a good enough artist to do the idea justice.

Corbie is bigger than me, though, and it was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to put my own insecurities aside and start getting her stories down on paper. What followed was an arduous nine months of drawing, inking, lettering and coloring, because I was too stubborn to cede control over any aspect of this comic to anyone else. At the end of that time, I still only had about half of Corbie’s origin story on paper, with mixed results.

Yes, issue #1 of Corinne Morgan, Corbie is rough. I’ve since gone back and redrawn a few of the most glaringly bad panels, but eventually I had to just accept it for what it is and move on. I liken it to the first (production) episode of The Simpsons, which nearly put the entire existence of the show in jeopardy. Most of it needed to be re-animated, and watching it now you can see everyone involved is figuring out how the show would work as they go. The same could be said for Corbie, where the character models, coloring style and just about every other visual element took a while to get right.

After completing issue #1, I set about redesigning the entire cast in a more simplified style. Work on the second issue commenced shortly thereafter. While still not perfect – nothing ever is – in my opinion it’s a much more appealing and visually coherent comic than the first. Perhaps more importantly, it was completed in a much shorter timeframe. Still not as quickly as I would have liked, but it’s a start. Issue #2 will be online in time for the 2018 holiday season, and hopefully you’ll agree with my assessment of it. Ideally, eventually, I’d like to produce four issues of the comic a year, and I expect each of them will be about 13-15 pages in length.

I’m dealing with a lot of anxiety as I write this about “going public” with Corbie, although the bar for what it would take for me to consider it a success is incredibly low. This is not a commercial venture. There’s no Kickstarter, no Patreon, no advertising, no monetization at all. What I hope for is that during the run of this comic there’s some insight in there that another introvert or HSP will find helpful to them in their daily lives. Selfishly, I also hope that when someone asks them who their favorite superhero is, they can say with all sincerity that it’s Corbie.