Your Hosts
Chris Howard
Editor and Chief-Goof
Chris is based on a platform of Lego and Tea. He co-created Dressed for Success, co-writes the story and colours comic pages.
Jeff Wasson
Chainedman to the Board
Jeff runs on pizza and water. He co-created Dressed for Success and co-writes the story, pencils, inks and letters comic pages.
Egesta Comics
Egesta Comics began publishing its first book Dressed for Success, by Chris Howard and Jeff Wasson, back in 1991 after their first year of post-secondary education. What started as a summer lark quickly turned into an ongoing story with a print run that grew with its readership.
To share the story with more and more people, Chris and Jeff started doing conventions and interacting with people in the community, forming long-lasting ties with other local comics creators and getting to meet some of their own heroes like Phil Foglio, Dave Sim, Jeff Smith and Greg Hyland.
Keeping multiple issues of a photocopied mini-comic in print began to become a challenge, and two unexpected meetings led to not only the publication of the first Dressed For Success trade Paperback, The Dirty Baker’s Dozen, (collecting issues 1-13) but Egesta Comics being distributed to stores near and far like “real honest to goodness comics”.
What had started out as a fun summer project had taken on a life of its own. The mini-comic run was slated to run to issue 25, finishing the second story arc. December 1996 saw the release of the final mini-comic issue of Dressed for Success with Chris and Jeff gearing up to start it as a full-size book sometime in late 1997.
Then, as so often is the case, life happened. Work began on the new series, but the Comics industry went to poop; stores closed, distributors merged and being a smaller publisher was like trying to be Kevin Costner with a British accent in the movie Robin Hood. Both Chris and Jeff’s personal lives became busier, and with work and school taking their toll Dressed For Success was allowed to quietly fade.
The lean years saw Jeff doing inking work for Slave Labour Graphics, Image Comics and others, while Chris switched hats and spent nine summers performing at the Ontario Renaissance Festival. Jeff relocated to the West Coast in 2004 and there was a short-lived affair with bringing DFS back as an online webcomic, but life and distance made this challenging to sustain and the project stalled.
In 2008 Jeff moves back to the Toronto area and a new commitment to bringing Dressed For Success to the web is made. The first page of a full-colour webcomic version of the series launched in December 2009 and continued, with a substantial pause in between, for just over four years before ending with page 200. Things came to a halt 20 pages from the end of the second webcomic storyline called Ghosts of Bounty Hunters Past.
