Welcome back to another installment of Projects That Never Happened (PTNH), where I share various projects that never came together. This time around we’re going back to the early 2000s (though I can’t remember the exact year). I had developed a mini series called TOKEN, about a former superhero who comes out of retirement to save the world. It was a dark, cynical story about Onyx, a Black superhero who spent his crime-fighting career being treated like nothing more than a token sidekick. When his former partner in crime-fighting is brutally murdered, Onyx returns after more than twenty years.
I worked with my good friend Robert Love, who did a bunch of character designs of Onyx, some of the supporting characters, and even penciled the first five or six pages. But the project never got any further along than that. Only a few images still exist, but the vast majority of the material has been lost.
This is the only page from TOKEN that still exists.
Character design for Crusader
Character design for Democracy Defender
Character design for Ghetto BlasterOnce in a while I think about returning to this project, but it has yet to happen. Somewhere, on one of my countless external hard-drives, there are scripts for the entire series (I think it was four issues)…but I’m too lazy to look for them.