Comic book weddings. Time-honored traditions that feature tens of heroes either in their costumes or their civilian duds all there to witness the joyous occasion and fight off the inevitable supervillain attack.  Not this time.

Normally, these things are pretty cut and paste, but since the comic book wedding in question is taking place in the pages of The Savage Dragon, and the groom just happens to be the Dragon, it's a safe bet that nothing about this wedding will be typical, including the cover to Previews, an image which showed Dragon and his bride in a passionate embrace, including the Dragon pulling his new bride's wedding dress up by the hem. While the cover gave a few comic shop owners fits, it was just more of the same from Erik Larsen.

"Whatever," Larsen laughed when asked about the cover. "Everybody does the same old crap, the same old standard wedding shot, so I wanted to tweak the same old crap. You've got to give people what they expect but something new at the same time.  That sums up this whole wedding thing for the Dragon."

The Savage Dragon, Larsen's creator-owned Image title, is a good 60 issues old and has attracted a loyal group of fans, from regular comics readers to pros such as Kurt Busiek, who counts himself as one of the Dragon's biggest fans.

In going with the non-typical approach to the wedding, this isn't Dragon's first time getting near the altar. Back in issue #27, his then-girlfriend Rapture asked the big lug to marry her. The Dragon's answer to Rapture's question was decided by the fans via a write-in vote with a ballot in issue #25. The fans' reply came down to the wire and by an 8-vote margin the Dragon remained
single.

That time.

Fast-forward three years. Dragon has been booted from the Chicago police force, joined Special Operations Strikeforce, gone into space, defeated Darklord, quit SOS, had his consciousness transferred into another body, got it back and fallen in love with Jennifer Murphy, "Smasher" of SOS.

Since her debut in the Savage Dragon: Sex and Violence miniseries, Larsen has had plans for her. In a comic that is about as irreverent as a junior high boy's bathroom on its good days, Larsen has treated the Jennifer/Dragon relationship with kid gloves.  This one is serious and for a good reason.

Finally, in issue #60, without fanfare, the Dragon asked Jennifer to marry him. She said 'yes.' The wedding is coming up in #62, which ships later this month.

So why not have the Dragon marriage question answered by a write-in vote this time?

"I did that once and everyone seemed to enjoy it," Larsen says. "Now it's a 'been there, done that' kind of issue, and also, when it's all said and done, it's my book. The Dragon/Rapture thing was an unusual situation where I had two different places where I could go, not really sure what I wanted to do, so I thought it would be fun to leave it up to a vote and see what happens."

"Dragon marrying Jennifer is an entirely different situation. I know exactly where I want to go, and in order for me to get there, there are pieces that have to be put into place, and there are things that need to happen. There's no room to put it up to a vote.  If I put it up to a vote, the story I want to tell doesn't get to be told. The other thing with a vote - I'm not telling that story again.  I don't want to tell the same story two times. Every time Scorpion shows up in this Spider-Man, it's not a whole new ball of wax - everyone knows he's coming after J. Jonah Jameson for the 999th time. I like to have a comic that's unpredictable."

So why is Larsen so adamant about Dragon marrying Jennifer Murphy? Readers of The Savage Dragon Archives and the short black and white reprints of Larsen's early fanzine work he ran a couple of years ago in The Savage Dragon miniseries reprint know - in Larsen's original plans, Dragon and Jennifer were married.

Really, you read it right - they were married.

Huh?

"In the comics I did as a kid, Dragon was married to Jennifer," Larsen says. "Since she's been introduced in Sex & Violence #1, I've been moving the storyline to get these two kids together. That's been the whole plan since day one. I wanted to get this comic to be in the same place as where it was when I left off 17 years ago."

Seventeen years ago, a young Erik Larsen was putting together Dragon comics for fanzines such as Graphic Fantasy and the never-published Plenty O' Comics before he was 'discovered' and moved on to an attention-grabbing run on Spider-Man among other projects.

When Larsen left Marvel with Image's other rebels, the Dragon still spoke to Larsen, and he began a series with the character he had created in fifth grade.

"I did this story when I was a kid," Larsen says. "This, having Dragon marry Jennifer, is right where I left off. Now, I can pick up right where I left off, which is a very cool thing to do - it's really a neat feeling to be able to follow stuff through, almost 20 years later."

The Dragon's wedding isn't going to be your typical superhero wedding, despite the fact that both the bride and the groom are superheroes. But then again, The Savage Dragon isn't your typical superhero comic book.

"This is Jennifer's second marriage," Larsen explains. "She's been married before, and people got to see that marriage's final days in Sex and Violence miniseries. She's got her daughter, Angel, now, so she's not looking for a fancy church wedding, which is fine by the Dragon. The wedding itself takes place in the backyard of her house with a really small group of people, not everybody from every comic that I could squeeze in there. Again, I did one of those big, overblown weddings in issue #41 when Barbaric married Ricochet. I called a gazillion different creators and asked if I could borrow their characters for an
appearance. Everybody was really accommodating in letting me play with their toys, but this isn't like that. It still comes down to me not wanting to do the same story over and over and over again. In that respect, we're doing a really quiet, nice wedding."

And as such, don't even expect Larsen to pull off the time-honored comic creator wedding tradition of drawing themselves into the wedding.

"I'm not there at all," Larsen says. "I can be very self-indulgent when it comes to the Dragon, but putting myself in as the priest or a guest is a little too much of a self-congratulatory wink at myself. I just don't want to go there."

For Larsen, completing the story that he began nearly two decades ago has come with a certain feeling of liberation as well.

"While it's neat that I started in one place when I was a little kid, and I got it to a certain place was very cool as a kid," Larsen says. "But to be able to do the same thing now, and having started in a completely different place and to get to that same place- it's a freeing thing. Now I can do anything, because for all these years, the wedding is what I've been building toward and now that I've done it and its out of the way, I can go and do anything I want to. I guess I could've always gone and done what I wanted, but this certainly has this feeling for me of 'cool.' Before I always thought that I had to be addressing this that or the other because I had already started a certain story all those years ago, and I needed to finish it before I could tell another.  Now, I can go anywhere with Dragon."

So how does Larsen, one of comics' busier creators, manage to squeeze issues of the Dragon out every three weeks?

"One of the things that's made it possible for me to have this book come out on this insane schedule is simply that I'm retelling stories that I did when I was 19 years old," Larsen says. "I've lightboxed off two issues worth of Dragon, and they're sitting here ready to be inked."

Something that adds a monkey wrench to the mix, however, is the fact that some of this earlier work has already come out.  "This early stuff was in the Savage Dragon Archives four issue miniseries," Larsen says. "The first two of those are being re-done as issues #63 and #65 of the regular book, and we've seen 12 pages of #64 in Comic Shop News. It's a weird way of telling story - I've already given away the ending, and now, I'm showing how I got to that point. For me, it's still kind of interesting to find out how the butler did it. It should be interesting to people who have read the other stuff - they know what's coming and can see how all the pieces fall into place for the slightly different ending."

Fans worried that Larsen is just dusting off old fanzine-quality issues of Dragon needn't be; while he may have lightboxed a few pages here and there, Larsen reports that he's reworked and tinkered with the dialogue, layouts, pencils and inks of each individual issue to make sure it reads and looks like it was created today, not seventeen years ago. After all, Larsen says, the sensibilities of a 19-year-old are quite different from that of a thritysomething professional comic creator.

Larsen's re-use of his earlier material is what's allowing him to take on his tri-weekly shipping schedule for the summer. While Marvel or DC may occasionally ship bi-weekly, their books usually alternate creative teams to keep up with the pace. Not Larsen - as it has been from the beginning, each issue of The Savage Dragon is 100% Larsen.

The frantic summertime pace does have a reason - in order to ship The Savage Dragon #100 on the 10th anniversary of the first issue of Savage Dragon, Larsen realized he had to play catch up and step up his pace. With the summer tri-weekly schedule and barring any unforeseen ailments, injuries or printing plant shutdowns, Larsen should reach #100 ten years to the month #1 shipped.

"It's gonna kill me, man," Larsen says. "Once I get to #100, there very well could be four months of nothing. Sooner or later, the neighbors would notice the smell."

Something that's chugging along hand in hand with Larsen's Dragon schedule is the growing pile of Savage Dragon original art.  Unlike many other artists, Larsen doesn't sell off pages of original pencils and inks from Dragon issues, preferring to keep them in his studio in a pile that grows an inch or two every month.

Larsen's reasons for holding on to his art? Both philosophical and practical.

"Selling it just seemed wrong," Larsen says. "That's the best I can explain it - it didn't seem like a good thing to do. Plus I recycle a hell of a lot. I can dig up backgrounds for new issues, or a lot of times I'm re-iterating or echoing scenes I've done in previous issues, and I can find the layout, because I've still got the page it came from. Then I can lead people up and make them think that the story is going one way, because the art looks familiar, and then give them a totally different ending. It's all part of keeping people guessing."

While his use of old issues, a lightbox and previous pages of original art may have some critics saying that Larsen isn't exactly quite the busiest man in comics, the creator has two words for them, one of them none too printable.

"%$#@ 'em," Larsen says with his typical good nature intact. "These issues of the Dragon coming this summer will be damn good issues of Dragon. They won't be any different from the issues around them. No one is going to look at them and think that they stand out because they're really crappy. The layouts that I did initially were fairly strong, and the changes that I've made to those layouts has made them considerably stronger. The dialogue initially was pretty decent, and the dialogue as rewritten is considerably stronger, so this will work out okay."

That said, Larsen is confident about how the Dragon audience and comic readers picking up the Dragon for the first time this summer will like the issues, despite their unorthodox production.

"They'll be comics that you'll remember over the summer," Larsen says. "The people who've read the Dragon Archives are going to get something new out of them, and the people who haven't are going to be surprised by what's in them. They're not going to stand out as being any more weird or unusual than any typical issue of Dragon, which is pretty weird and unusual anyway."

With Dragon on a tri-weekly schedule for the summer, you can bet that Larsen more than likely doesn't have a spare minute to devote to the delay ridden Superman - Savage Dragon team up, which was originally on deck for last summer and is still coming. According to Larsen, the crossover is sort of changing the way he works away from his usual seat of the pants style.

"DC's going to wait until both issues of the crossover are done before they solicit them," Larsen says. "For my issue, that could be awhile, because when I see something listed in Previews, I figure it's time to get moving and do it. DC's view is that they have to be done and printed before they can be listed. I'm not used to that method of working. I don't really like that method of working, but I guess I'll get moving pretty soon."

The two issues of the crossover go by the working titles of Superman/Savage Dragon: Metropolis and Superman: Savage Dragon: Chicago, with Larsen producing the Chicago installment.

"Chicago takes place back when Savage Dragon was a cop and Metropolis takes place allegedly now, but depending on when they schedule these things, it may be different," Larsen says. "I told DC that at a certain point in time, Dragon would be at such a place. But if they delay the book for four more months, well, Dragon doesn't sit still. Dragon is an entirely different book in four months. Dragon's not about to be a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper forever - he changes and moves. The book could be something else entirely by the time they get around to their story."

"That's the problem in doing a crossover with Dragon - it changes a lot as the months go by. He could be dead. Some of these other characters, you can kind of count on at least getting back to the status quo eventually - Superman came back to his regular costume and before that, it was back to the short hair. Everything with Superman is back to where it was 10 years ago, with the exception that he's married. The Dragon/Superman story that I'm doing, Superman won't have been married yet. It's going to be the single guy Superman meets the single guy Savage Dragon, where theirs is going to be the married heroes meet."

And what does Larsen have in store for the Dragon after that? Wedding bliss? A honeymoon? Ever tight-lipped about his creation and the cast of hundreds he's created over the last seven years, Larsen thinks for a moment before answering with his standard line about the Dragon's future plans….

"... and wackiness ensues."