Monthly Archives: February 2011

Nat Gertler to the Rescue!

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This post will be a lit­tle out­side my ordi­nary, but I think it’s war­rant­ed in order to give cred­it where cred­it’s due.

Since launch­ing this site, I’d been telling peo­ple that it was 90–95% of the way there to what I want­ed it to be. There were a few items where I just could­n’t quite fig­ure out how to tweak them into what I need­ed. But as of late yes­ter­day, that has final­ly changed!

This is cour­tesy of an old friend, writer and expert/dabbler in many things, Nat Gertler. I approached him to see if per­haps he might be able to tweak those inter­web thin­gies that need­ed tweak­ing, and he agreed to give it a shot. And he did it bril­liant­ly! It’s a huge relief to have my site final­ly work­ing just the way I always want­ed it to work. So, a very big “Thanks!” goes out to Nat.

So what’s with the bear? Well, I thought it would be bor­ing to have a post with no images. These pan­els come from a sto­ry I drew fea­tur­ing Nat’s Licens­able Bear™. LB™ and Mis­ter U.S. are prob­a­bly the main things that Nat and I have had the plea­sure of col­lab­o­rat­ing on. You can see sam­ples of my Mis­ter U.S. work on the site here, here and here.

Mis­ter U.S. is ™ and © Nat Gertler and Mark Lewis, Licens­able Bear™ is ™ and © Nat Gertler.

By Popular Demand

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Okay, “pop­u­lar demand” may be stretch­ing things, but I’ve had two or three peo­ple ask­ing me about this late­ly. I actu­al­ly was­n’t plan­ning on post­ing this one. I was begin­ning to feel like maybe I was post­ing too much old stuff, and should stick to more new work. But when you’ve got mul­ti­ple peo­ple sep­a­rate­ly ask­ing about one spe­cif­ic draw­ing they remem­ber that you did awhile back, it seems like maybe that’s some­thing to pay atten­tion to.

This is a draw­ing I’d done back when I was work­ing on “The Real Adven­tures of Jon­ny Quest” at Han­na-Bar­bera. Noth­ing to do with the show at all; this was just one of those goofy ideas that pop into your head while you’re work­ing on a series, and it won’t let go until you get it out on paper. I can’t explain where it came from, but hey; would­n’t it be cool to see a female ver­sion of Race Ban­non run­ning around kick­ing butt? I mean, it total­ly worked for Star­buck in the new “Bat­tlestar Galactica.”

Pre-Pho­to­shop days for me, this was col­ored with mark­ers. There was anoth­er Jon­ny Quest draw­ing I did around this time that I post­ed in my Gallery. You can check that out here if you like.

I’ll try to have some new stuff for next time.

Now It Can Be Told!

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Some may recall there was a mys­te­ri­ous “teas­er” post I put up back before Christ­mas. I’d been asked to hold off on putting the full art­work for it on my site…until now. So here it is, final­ly: a copy of Amaz­ing Faw­cett Fan­ta­sy #15.

Nev­er seen one before? That’s because it does­n’t exist. It was done as the cov­er for FCA #159, which will be appear­ing in the upcom­ing land­mark 100th issue of Alter Ego. You can see it in con­text with the FCA logo and every­thing else over in my Gal­leries.

You’re prob­a­bly say­ing, “Wait, you goofed up! That does­n’t look any­thing like Spi­der-man!” Ah, but it seems that before the Spi­der-man we’re all famil­iar with came to be, there were sev­er­al vil­lain “spi­der men” char­ac­ters who cropped up in var­i­ous Faw­cett strips. Includ­ing the fel­low on this cov­er here, who went up against Cap­tain Marvel.

This assign­ment was sev­er­al lev­els of fun: get­ting to do my best C.C. Beck impres­sion, try­ing to fig­ure out just what a Faw­cett com­ic might have looked like had they still been pub­lish­ing into the ear­ly 60’s, and work­ing out how to use Pho­to­shop to make it look like a real, well-read comic.

Many thanks to both P.C. Hamer­linck and Roy Thomas for invit­ing me to be part of this mile­stone issue!

Yowza, Yowza, Yowza!

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As I men­tion on my “About” page, I was in a band back in the 80’s. (I know: “Who was­n’t in a band in the 80’s?”) We were called the Contact.

Since I was the artist/graphic design­er in the band, I wound up doing all our fly­ers. It was a blast, because I could pret­ty much do just about any­thing I want­ed. You can see a few sam­ples of my Con­tact fly­ers over in the Gal­leries here.

Here’s anoth­er one (which may even­tu­al­ly make its way over into the Gal­leries too). A lot of the time, band fly­ers tend to draw from the same sources over and over. For this one, it occurred to me it might be fun to bor­row visu­al influ­ences of an ear­li­er age for once. And it was! I had fun dig­ging up all the ref­er­ence in the library (pre-inter­net days, y’all), then pulling all those influ­ences togeth­er to make a 30’s style band fly­er. I think I did a pret­ty good job of car­toon­ing all of us too (though I’ve nev­er played a stand-up bass in my life). It was fun to get to do some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent, and I was hap­py with how this exper­i­ment worked out.

Por­tions of the fly­er are cen­sored here, sim­ply because I don’t think our gen­er­ous hosts back then would appre­ci­ate their home address being post­ed on the internet.

Something Old, Something New…?

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So I was post­ing a lot of old­er mate­r­i­al I did for the Lab my last sev­er­al posts. It struck me it was time for some­thing new. And though this looks real­ly old, like some­thing I pored through 60-year-old books of clip art to dig up and scan, it actu­al­ly is some­thing new. It’s an illus­tra­tion done very recent­ly for a pre­sen­ta­tion. It was fun to try to cap­ture that “retro” look, and I was hap­py with the end result. So…I’m post­ing it here!