The Specialists

Al is half of The Specialists’ creative team, but he contributes significantly more than half of the content. I’ve said things to this effect before, but it bears repeating. In addition to handling the visual side of things, Al also provides a fair amount of the story, both by helping to create the characters and shape the plot and by adding visual storytelling elements that never existed in my scripts.

This page is a good example of what I’m talking about. I had written another of my patented two-people-talking pages, and Al threw in Magda’s momentary transformation into her shadow form near the end. This one panel underlines Magda’s menace, reminds us that she has super-human powers, and just makes the page more interesting to look at. If it were up to me, this comic would be entirely composed of people standing in rooms delivering lines of dialogue. So if you enjoy all the other stuff that goes on, make sure to thank Al for that!