Whatever happened to Hot Lunch?

Michael Gerard and myself have been working together for several years. We collaborate on lots of projects, but the one that brought us together was Hot Lunch. A comic about a lay-about trust-fund heir, who finds himself on a karma-induced journey to redemption, we managed to produce a couple of strips and a full-color first issue. This past spring we set out to write a follow-up issue….and that’s about where things started to go south.

There were no personal issues within the collaboration. Mike and I just ended up being too busy with our respective course loads and extra-curricular activities to pull it off. We managed a script and storyboards, but when the started drawing the actual book, we found our learning-curve had significantly steepened. So much so, that our second book looked nothing like our first one. This wasn’t an unpleasant development, just unforeseen. Based on that, we decided that before we could continue our story, we would both prefer to go back and punch up (read: redraw) the first issue. Y’know, make it more cohesive overall. We were also fresh off of a rejection for a self-publishing grant which was causing us to rethink our pacing, styling, etc. Ultimately (since #2 was supposed to be course work), we decided to create something that was Hot Lunch related, but not a second issue- so we wrote “TV Dinner”, an apologetic aside about us, and why there was no Hot Lunch #2. It’s still in the works, just post-poned indefinitely. Have a look and enjoy!