Maelstrom had his own eponymous comic in 1982, part of an extended saga which has continued at length, but sadly these hundreds of later pages haven't seen
publication (though this story has neared completion).
These two colour pictures were part of the back cover of Maelstrom #1, which one of the guys at Minotaur Books commented should have been the front cover... he may have been right!
The excellent Australian comic, Reverie, picked up Maelstrom's adventures (actually a self-contained prequel to the epic) from #4 onwards. Working with the Reverie editor, Gary Dellar, and various artists there was a joy! The odd part was that the artwork here was superior to that in Maelstrom #1, though I've worked over the pages of that issue to match, in case the whole story ever does get into print.
There's a new page on Maelstrom at 
.
The following is just odd scans of frames from various issues of "Maelstrom" (in fact the first three issues, and not the second three as yet). Maybe these would work better as complete books, than as a series of 32 page comics. Please bear in mind that these are just randomly assorted frames to give an impression of what the feel of the artwork was like.
All characters, text and graphics are © Copyright, Ian Thomas.
Now that I look at these, I see they don't give any indication of my page layouts, one of the more inventive visual aspects of the project (apart from broken frames and stray bits of other pictures). Also, I couldn't include anything other than square frames.
When "Maelstrom" #1 came out in 1982, there were the inevitable reviewer comparisons to "Elfquest "(a brilliant comic, by the way). The only one that I could really see was the A4 format! Honestly, my primary inspiration for the central protagonist himself was some of Alan Garner's early books. When I was in high school, in 1978, we produced a small format comic that featured Maelstrom, The Theow, Zenith, Bramthorn and many of the same elements, and this was before "Elfquest." It was more a case of the time having come for independent fantasy based comics to emerge, and many great ones did!
When I first started this series, and came to the matter of including landscapes and wildlife, it seemed natural for the animals of my local environments to appear, rather than doing the traditional "Northern thing" and having wolves, bears, squirrels, etc. This decision was right, but I also included elements of the spirit mythology of local indigenous people (again, this seemed natural, given the setting). As the series went on, I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the mix of Western and Australian cultures and environments, and removed most of the more indigenous elements of the mythology (while it felt natural to me at the time, it came to feel like cultural appropriation). NOTE: For reasons that have since come to light, I've rethought this last statement, but more on that another day...
A second page of scans (from later issues) at some future time, perhaps...
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