About The Flying Banner

I was only going to draw The Flying Banner until I came up with a better idea.

It was the early 2000s. I was going to a comic book workshop run by local cartoonist John Mundt, Esq. and I didn't have any comic book pages to bring. Up till then, I had usually gravitated to gag panels and strips. I thought about a character that I'd doodled recently called Super Duck. What if I just drew a page or two of that to bring?

Well, I kept having more and more ideas for the character and his world. Those early pages were scrapped as I learned about comic art, and the name got dropped as well. (Turns out "Super Duck" was taken.)

Eventually, I developed it into my first web comic, The Flying Banner. It launched in March of 2004, and was online for about three years. During that time, I posted the first thirty page "issue" and began posting "issue two".

Issue two, however, was never finished. The webcomic ended abruptly at page eighteen in the middle of a scene. Eventually I took down my site and posted posted a message about the comics no longer reflecting who I was, and how excited I was to move on to other things.

In reality, I was being coerced into abandoning it. Or perhaps more accurately, I was being given new dictates by an authority figure that made creating The Flying Banner's universe impossible. I tried to find a way to make it work within the new rules. But even then, the best option I had was to suddenly reveal the entire comic had been a human's dream sequence and end the series.

So I could either ruin what I'd created and keep it as a reminder of my capitulation, or I could quit. I chose to quit.

But The Flying Banner stayed in the back of my head. I often thought about how the concepts could be reused. And eventually, when I finally escaped that situation, I dusted off the ideas. I'd lost interest in drawing anthropomorphic characters, but I eventually pulled many of the characters and ideas to form the world of BRYN.

So why bring it back now? Frankly, I did a heck of a lot of work for it to just vanish forever. The version of me who made The Flying Banner went through a lot trying to make it. I'm proud of this comic, even if it does feel rough by my current standards. I can finally finish a story I started over fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of my original files were lost in a hard drive failure, so it took some doing to piece together this archive.

Issue one is mostly the original web comic posts, edited together into page form. A few pages have some extra content that I left out of the web version originally, but rescanned for the archive.

Captain Bagel and Burrow is a short comic I made at some point during The Flying Banner's run, though I don't remember when.

Issue two is a bit more cobbled together. The first seventeen pages are scanned printouts that I was fortunate to still have.

I had finished inking the first three panels of page eighteen, and I believe I cleaned them up and posted them. However, that file was lost. I've rescanned and cleaned them up again for this archive. The rest of page eighteen is in varying levels of completion, but I'm including it along with a transcription.

I have thumbnails for pages nineteen into page twenty-four. I've typed a summary of the rest of the comic based on those thumbnails and my memory of what I had planned. Though I was always tweaking and changing as I went along.

I hope you enjoy this look back, and if by some chance you read The Flying Banner back in the day, I hope you enjoy getting an end to the story.