Wow, great to see this in colour.

Ahhh, Bea.

There needs to be more of her. MORE.

It was the lack of money and demands to step up to a quarterly schedule (farming out the work to other artists) that killed Bea. I like to eat and have a roof over my head while I work, and I like my work to be all my own... not part of a team effort. Temperamentally, I guess I'm more of a novelist than a comic book artist, but that's not how the industry works. Besides... sales were lousy.

you could still draw her from time to time. she has her fans

And now and then I do trot her out for a bit... but the ending of the story cycle is still a deeply kept secret... just in case I get an offer I can't refuse to finish it!

Heh make sure to will that ending to someone so if something happens...just saying. :D

I have a folder full of ideas for future Bea stories that I need to put in order. It might be easier to just write them as prose fiction...

Awesome work Taral.

I have the color version but it's somewhere in the closet of my old room of my parent's house back in Texas.

Sigh, Every time I visit I try to go in there to clean my stuff out and claim the stuff I want to make sure I keep, and every year the pile of stuff my parents put in there gets bigger. Man, my Furrlough collection's in there too,

I do wish her story had been continued. I suppose a webcomic is out of the question.

Not entirely... but I need to slim down the number of other committments I have, and some sort of return on my effort would be more than nice, it would be nearly essential.

Funny. Nice one.

I remember Bea!

Wasn't there only one issue of her own (technically two, but it was the same B&w comic with color added), and a few back-up spots?

There were two issues, one of them reissued in colour, and a separate short Bea "story" in Valiant Varmints. As well, there's a one pager "announcement" of future issues that's sort of a story... but nothing came of the announcement.

As well as that, Gallacci drew one complete story, and Terrie Smith two, both written by Fred Patten. They were all pre-suit stories, so might as well have been a different character.

You have me curious, so I'll have to dig the book out of my pile when I can! It's been a number of years since I've read (and very much enjoyed) this.

Compared with the published comic page, your colors offer better contrast between the background and the characters and are less murky, especially in the third panel. Your pink alien shows up better compared to the published mostly green alien, especially against your muted grays of the rubble compared to their purples. They also seem to have erased a number of lines, most noticeably the shading on Beatrix in panel 2 (which made her lines look the ink had bled) and (alas) the jaunty little "poof" as the eviction notice catches fire. I don't know how much of that is because of the difference in coloring (hand coloring, I assume, versus computer coloring), but it does point out that a colorist needs to know how color works no matter what medium they use. Coolness is no substitute for competency.

I never really liked the colour done on that issue, and was initially against doing it at all. But it could have been much worse -- ironically, there was too much purple used throughout the book... except where I indicated it.

Also ironic, the colured version was nominated by one or two people for the Eisner. Not the art or the story, just the fersluginner colour!

I think the color helped bring life to the comic. But I believe the big draw wasn't that it was colored. Rather, the draw was because it was colored with a computer, a really big thing back then, especially for an independent comic. It was full of bling, special, innovative, and shiny! in an era where they were just experimenting with digital coloring. It took a while for the digital colorists to relearn what traditional colorists had known all along: it's not the slickness of the tool that matters, but how well the colors complement the rest of the comic. Many still haven't relearned it.

Truth be told, the two pages with Beatrix crawling through the nuclear reactor's wreckage always looked to me to be the worst in the comic. Your recolor above shows why. An improved color scheme complementing the existing art coupled with not erasing any of the lines would be in order for a reprint (assuming it didn't go with black-and-white). Definitely less purple in the wrong places and keep that little "poof"!

Bea's the new sheriff in town.

Hey...I think I remember this....can't remember which comic it appeared in though...or if I could find it...

Beatrix 1, either the Mu Press b/w edition or the Vision Comics colour version. There is no other place.

I bought the Vision Comics version! Now to go look for it!

I remember reading this a long time ago. It was one of my favorite stories. The artwork and writing were terrific!

Beatrix was able to win to her destination because that uniform that's fused to her, protects her against any & all harm. Right ?

The Metal Men were incinerated by the fires of Plutonium Man and app. in a retcon from Zero Hour or a later Crisis upheaval, their responsiometers were cooked making their resurrection impossible. It took a good while, before Dr. Magnus was able to reinvent them from scratch.

Yes -- that's more or less the premise of Beatrix in full -- the only other thing pertinent is that she's an unimaginative sort of person who's too practical to want to be a superhero, but is one whether she likes it or not.

I don't know anything about the Metal Men after the original series was cancelled in the 1960s, except one three issue mini-series in which it turns out they weren't robots, but the personalities of real people trapped in the robot bodies. I didn't care for it that much and saw no point to the revision.

Well, THAT was dismissed as a delusion of Dr.Magnus and was retconned out as such. Dr.Magnus was back in the next appearance.

It's like a whole season of Dallas was retconned as a dream,and that Bobby was alive, and stepping out of the shower as the girl's dream ended and she awoke.

Also in the final episode of Rosanne, the events of the whole season turned out to be a WHAT IF fantasy of Rosanne's, her husband having actually died from his heart attack, and they did NOT win the g--d

---

lottery.

There were also complaints about the entirity of the St.Elsewhere series being but the fantasy of an autistic patient there. AND the entire Bob Newhart series on that hotel in Vermont being but a dream caused by Japanese food.

Loved that last one, about Newhart... but was also annoyed. I liked the show about the hotel a lot more than the one where he was a psychiatrist and would rather Dr. Bob Hartley have been the dream of Dick Loudon.

Well, consider that the show about Bob Hartley PREDATED the one about Dick Loudon, NOT vice versa.

There was a sequel, where Bob Hartley encountered the 3 men with the same name,in an elevator, doing their routine from the hotel show.

Such conditions as shown here, likely did exist in the core of Chernobyl -where gamma radiation became visible as a green crawling fire (but to see it was instantly fatal to all but one man who saw it !) The city is permanently abandoned and only investigators may enter the city and its environs.

I may have had that in mind... I'm too lazy to go check a calendar.

There was also a new mineral created in the core of Chernobyl, as I recall. It had never existed before because there had never been any significant number of atoms of Plutonium or U238 or whatever to combine with more pedestrian elements into a molecule before.