I’ve talked in previous posts about how much I liked the golden age Superman and Batman. But without a doubt, my favorite golden age character would have to be Captain Marvel. When DC brought him back from publishing limbo in the early ’70s, I was already primed for it. I’d read about the “Big Red Cheese” in our local library’s copy of All in Color for a Dime, as well as in The Steranko History of Comics. Something about the visual and the idea of the character hooked me, even without ever having seen a single Captain Marvel story yet.

Not to dismiss the stories, but a huge part of the appeal of those golden age Captain Marvel comics for me is the art. As the character’s designer and main artist, C.C. Beck set the tone there. Most golden age comic book artists doing superheroes looked to the newspaper adventure strips for their inspiration. They mostly tended to fall into one of two schools: it was either the illustrative realism of Foster and Raymond, or the more impressionistic approach of Sickles and Caniff. Instead, Beck looked to the “funny” portion of the funny pages for his inspiration (like Jack Cole did with Plastic Man). The result was a strip that had a look and feel like no other. And of course, the writing played a role in making that possible too.

While the higher-ups at Fawcett may have wanted Bill Parker and C.C. Beck to just give them a knockoff of Superman, that was not what they got. They got something better. Many readers back then must have thought so too; at the peak of the character’s popularity, they were publishing Captain Marvel Adventures bi-weekly and selling 1.3 million copies of each issue!

I know sometimes modern fans have trouble with Mr. Tawky Tawny and some of the more whimsical aspects of the strip, but for me, the classic Captain Marvel material is inspirational stuff. I wish I could tell you of a relatively cheap and easy way to lay hands on that work if you haven’t seen it, but it seems harder to come by these days.

If you’re not familiar with the company, Nedor published (under several names) during the golden age. They actually had a fairly sizable group of heroes, including Doc Strange. Nedor ceased publishing comics at the end of the golden age. Since then, many people have taken a shot at doing something with their old characters. AC Comics has made use of them over the years, and so did Alan Moore and Peter Hogan more recently in the Tom Strong spinoff miniseries, Terra Obscura.

Doc was a scientist/adventurer who invented a serum he named Alosun, distilled from “sun atoms.” This serum gave him superhuman strength, flight and invulnerability when he used it.

Enough of the history lesson. So why did I do this pinup/cover? Easy; because I was asked. The one and only Will Meugniot is currently doing a new creator-owned series (in the back of AC Comics’ FemForce) that picks up the threads of the Nedor books with the descendants of some of the characters. It’s called “Agents of N.E.D.O.R.,” and is intended as a period piece taking place in 1965. Will invited several artists to contribute pinups of the original Nedor characters, and I was very flattered to be asked if I’d like to do so too.

As is typical for me, instead of making things simple on myself, I had to make a whole cover out of it. Since Will’s story takes place in 1965, I thought this should be a cover for Thrilling Comics (which starred Doc) also from ’65, as if Nedor had kept on publishing all that time. I even did some math to work out the issue number. How’s that for obsessive?

Doc Strange most often went on his adventures accompanied by his young sidekick Mike (who wore an identical outfit, only with the addition of a green cape for some reason). I thought it would be more fun though to show Doc with his girlfriend, Virginia Thompson, as she would also sometimes take part in his adventures. Of course, I updated her look here for the times.

This will appear in b/w line art form in FemForce #159, since the book has b/w interiors. But for my blog here, I wanted to go full color. Because it’s how I saw this in my head from the start. I get asked to do a b/w pinup and I envision something in color; go figure!

Thanks, Will. This was a lot of fun!

I don’t normally do a lot of caricature. So I figured as long as I was going to attempt it, I might take my cues from one of the best: Al Hirschfeld. It was definitely a challenge to work this way, but I was happy with the result. Oh; don’t strain your eyes looking for “Ninas,” because there aren’t any!

Not much more to say about this right now, except; Mom, Dad, I love you very much.

This was done while I attended Art Center in Pasadena, back in the early ’90s. Some of the specifics are lost to time now, but I had an illustration class at the time, and for our final, we were to do a self-portrait. The parameters of the assignment and how you could interpret it were wide open.

I wasn’t sure what to do, how to approach it, and was wracking my brains. Until one of my friends in the class made the offhand comment, “Oh, you’ll just do yours as a comic, right?” It was one of those forehead-slapping moments. I was too close to it to see the solution myself, though it was the obvious way to go in the eyes of my friends in the class who knew my interest in comics.

And this was the result. Though I think I draw a bit better now (I did this twenty years ago now?! Yeesh!), I still kind of like this. I think most artists can relate, at some point or another. Anyway, enjoy! I hope to have some new current work to post next time.

Unfortunately, though I’ve got all these projects going, they’re all just works-in-progress at the moment. None of them are done and ready to post. Even if they were, some of the people I’m doing them for might not be ready for me to put them up quite yet. And with the holidays so close, I don’t think I’m going to have time to do anything else special for my site right now. So in lieu of that, I hope maybe some sneak peeks at a couple of the works in progress will suffice for the moment. It’s either that, or let this month go by without posting anything.

One brand new item I can point out: I am pleased to announce that I am now being represented by Ellen Ann Mersereau, who works with a roster of some of the most talented creators in the business. You can find her contact info over to your right in the sidebar.

Wherever you are, whatever your current circumstances, I hope the holidays are good to you; that you have a good Christmas, and an excellent New Year!

Let me explain about the illustration first. My younger brother is writing a book, and asked me to do the cover illustration. Over the years, we’ve collaborated on a number of projects (including our band, back in the ’80s). And it’s always an interesting and challenging experience (in the best senses of those words), because I have a lot of freedom to try things that I probably couldn’t for other clients. Usually, I wind up heading into new and unfamiliar territory that I might not have explored on my own. This piece is a case in point: we wound up with Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam as reinterpreted through a kind of “street art” lens. Definitely not a direction I would’ve imagined myself going, but I’m pleased with the end product. Though don’t expect to go out late at night and find me throwing it up on the side of some building in the wilds of downtown Los Angeles!

Now on to my main subject: I’ve realized that this month marks the one year anniversary of my site. It seemed like this might be a good point to take a look back, and give something of a peek behind the curtain. When I first began to weigh the idea of putting up my own site, I was very reluctant to bother, to be honest. The only reason I did it was because it has become absolutely essential as an artist (particularly in animation) to have a website. Most studios now don’t want to handle physical portfolios anymore; they’d rather just have a link they can click on to view your work. So this was a case of “like it or not, you’ve got to do the research and get your own site up.”

But I’ve found a really good thing that has come out of having the site. As a kid, I used to love to draw. I’d spend hours at the kitchen table doing it. But fastforward to adulthood, and an unfortunate side effect sometimes of turning the thing you loved doing as a kid into the work you do for a living as an adult, is that you can lose that love. When you spend all day being told what you’re supposed to draw and how to draw it, that can sap your motivation to draw anything for yourself when you’re off work. The last thing you feel like doing sometimes at the end of the day is to pick up a pencil again for yourself. But the thing is, it’s important to keep at least a portion of your art as an outlet for your own expression. Making time to draw for yourself is important. Hanging onto that love for drawing you once had as a kid is important.

And having my own site, where I can draw whatever I want, and in whatever style I want, has gone a ways toward helping me to regain that love. Though it’s a lame simile, it’s almost like my site’s become the internet equivalent of having a giant refrigerator that I can tack my art to, for people to see when they come by.

One other thing I decided, early on, (and I guess you can file this under “statement of purpose”) is that I wanted to stay on the positive side in anything I write here. It’s very easy to go negative. As my friends can tell you, I have my opinions about the things I don’t like in movies, cartoons, comics, etc., just like anyone else. But there are plenty of places on the internet where people can (and do) vent at length about things like that. I’d prefer to be a positive voice. Rather than waste time talking about what I don’t like (why give those things any further exposure?), why not spend my time talking about the things that I like? Why not give those things the spotlight? So that’s what I’ve tried to do thus far, and what I intend to keep doing. That, and showing off new work on my big internet refrigerator when I feel like it.

And that’s probably more than enough verbosity for one post! If you’ve actually made it through to this point, I wish all reading this a Happy Thanksgiving!

I’ve just been given the go-ahead to finally spill the beans about a project I worked on earlier this year. It’s what I was talking about in this post. I got to help with the art for a short Hydee and the Hy Tops comic, which is to be produced as a giveaway. You get to see it all above, for the first time anywhere, probably.

Once again, I was given the opportunity to collaborate with the lovely and talented Jim Stenstrum (who is trying to get together a site of his own. When that happens, it will be in my blogroll). Jim pencilled these pages, while I did all the coloring and lettering. There were no pencils harmed in the making of this comic, as there was no inking in the usual sense. The art style has no containment lines; just flat areas of color, with occasional bits of colored linework only where needed. The look of the comic was based on what we’d done for the flash-animated Hydee feature, which I don’t think has been released just yet (Though you can see some of the work I did for that here in my Galleries).

I enjoyed working with the Hydee characters, both in the comic and on the feature. The scenario was kind of “Josie and the Pussycats by way of the Go-Gos, but if they were being formed now for the Disney Channel,” if that description makes any sense. And the client was a dream to work with (which, as anyone in animation can tell you, is not something you can expect to happen all that often). I wish all clients were that good to work with! If the opportunity presented itself to work with the property again, under the same kind of circumstances, I would not hesitate to do it. It was fun.

When you boil it down, I suppose there’s not all that much to it. It’s just a nice bit of sculptural design for the head and helmet assembly. The thing that probably sells the alien and makes him memorable is the built-in uplighting they included in his helmet, so he carried “drama” with him wherever he went. Others’ mileage may vary, but the visual was striking enough to lodge in my head at least. It’s a good example of making very effective use of what was probably a limited production budget.

So here’s my shot at the Man from Planet X. I saw it as a chance to play around with some dramatic lighting and black-spotting. It’s a bit of an experiment, in that I tried to ink it the way Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles used to do: banging in all my blacks first with a brush (scary!), then going back in with pen where it still needed it. I do like the whole “lost edges” effect that working this way helps to achieve.

This scene didn’t exactly happen this way in the movie, but so what? It’s my blog, and I can draw what I want! And anyway, it seems a reasonably appropriate image for Halloween.

One last thing here, a bit of trivia: the female lead in the film was Margaret Field, the mother of Sally Field. I don’t know if anything like that would ever come up in a game of Trivial Pursuit or not, but if so, don’t say I never did anything for you!

UPDATE: FCA Editor P.C. Hamerlinck made me aware of the fact Fawcett had actually published a comic adapting this movie, with art by Kurt Schaffenberger, and that you can check out a b/w UK reprint of it here. Interesting to see Schaffenberger take his art in a different direction from what we’re used to seeing him do, and to note that there are places in the comic where they diverged from the movie! Thanks Paul!

So this time out, it’s Wonder Woman. If you’ve read my previous posts on these golden age characters, I realized I kind of unconsciously set up a progression; I mentioned that I liked Superman, but later confessed I liked Batman a little more. So you might be expecting me this time out to say I liked Wonder Woman the best. But you’d be wrong.

Sorry to say, I really wasn’t all that into Wonder Woman as a kid. I appreciate the strip much more now as an adult than I did back then, for its historic significance as well as some of the aspects that are unique to it (the fantasy elements, the mythological, etc.). Perhaps the golden age art (by H.G. Peter) looked a little heavy-handed and crude to me in some ways as a kid. Looking at it now, I have more of an appreciation for it (It feels at times like a sort of cartoon version of an Albrecht Dürer engraving).

Wonder Woman is an interesting concept that seems to be a tough one for writers and artists to get a handle on. And even if they manage, it seems hard to get a handle on it such that it will engage people and get them to buy the book (Which is probably the more important point). Many approaches have been tried with varying degrees of success, and some don’t get tried at all. But Marston and Peter must’ve had a handle on something when they created her. She’s survived this long and managed to become part of our collective pop culture mental landscape, recognizable even to non-comics readers. I think that’s worth a little salute here.

A confession: this poster is a loose homage (which I acknowledged in how I signed it) to an original poster by Ludwig Hohlwein. In studying his work online, I stumbled across one poster that just seemed a natural to adapt for a Wonder Woman image. It all but cried out for it. So that is what I did!