Back in the early 90's I was involved with an "artist-run center" up in Winnipeg, Canada, called "Plug-In". We mostly showed Conceptually based paintings, installation and performance art, but we tried to liven things up from time to time, so we brought in Fantagraphics' touring "Misfit Lit" show of original comics art.
We flew Chester Brown, Charles Burns and Mary Fleener in for the occasion, and afterwards, Chester was kind enough to send me a copy of his graphic novel Ed the Happy Clown, which had one or two panels in it based on old comics panels which he had used as a "point of departure" - more or less "sampling" them, in other words. I loved this approach (I was doing big paintings based on found images at the time) and wondered if it would be possible to make a whole story that way.
I went and bought a huge stack of old comics and cut them all up to make a big pile of panels, then fished around in them and pulled pieces out at random to try and collage a story together. The result was a comic called Captain Adam, which you can read here (if you click on the pages you'll also see the collages each page was based on). Here's the collage I made for the cover:
And here's the ink drawing I made from it:
Here's the pencil crayon on Xerox color study I did for the company (Digital Chameleon, operated by Winnipeg's own Lovern Kindzierski, one of the pioneers of digital coloring) which created the original digital separations:
and finally, here's the cover with digital color recreated by me a few years ago (I couldn't find Digital Chameleon's version) for a revised version put out by Blurred Books here in NYC:
(Click on the images to see larger versions)