Good Garbage!”

FCA Goodguy CoverFirst things first: yes, this is anoth­er FCA cov­er illus­tra­tion, which will appear in the Jan­u­ary 2014 issue of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego, on stands in Decem­ber. And no: this is not Cap­tain Marvel!

The char­ac­ters here are Goodguy and his neme­sis, Dr. Sin. Pri­or to being asked to do this cov­er, I must con­fess I was unfa­mil­iar with them. They were cre­at­ed by fan artist Alan Jim Han­ley. As a young comics fan, I had no clue that there were that many oth­er peo­ple out there who also loved old comics, let alone that there were fans who did their own comics! So I nev­er came across the exis­tence of this strip back then.

My title for this post comes from Goodguy’s peri­od­ic catch­phrase, his equiv­a­lent of Cap­tain Mar­vel’s and Bil­ly Bat­son’s “Holy Moley!” Though we did­n’t wind up incor­po­rat­ing it into the cov­er direct­ly, my post here seemed a good place to use it.

In doing the cov­er, I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to read a cou­ple of Goodguy sto­ries. Fun stuff! Along with his sense of humor, Han­ley clear­ly had a lot of love for old comics, and old comics char­ac­ters. I would­n’t mind see­ing some more.

Oh; I should men­tion too that the FCA issue I did this cov­er for also reprints a com­plete Goodguy sto­ry, appear­ing in col­or for the very first time. Yours tru­ly did the coloring.

5 thoughts on “Good Garbage!”

  1. John G. Pierce

    Mark, you did a tremen­dous job of cap­tur­ing the essence of Han­ley’s Goodguy in this draw­ing. I knew A. J. through cor­re­spon­dence, and I think he would have been great­ly pleased by what you did here. I can hard­ly wait to see the sto­ry in color.

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Thanks much, John! It’s espe­cial­ly grat­i­fy­ing to hear from some­one who knew Han­ley, as I would hope he would’ve enjoyed my ver­sion of his character.

      Reply
      1. John G. Pierce

        Mark, here is some­thing else which occurred to me. In one of his fanzines, pub­lished not long after the debut of the SHAZAM live-action TV show, A. J. com­ment­ed that “Jack­son Bost­wick looks more like Goodguy than he does Cap­tain Mar­vel,” but pro­nounced that as “okay.” It might be intrigu­ing to see Jack­son pho­to­shopped into Goodguy’s costume.

        Reply
  2. John G. Pierce

    Mark, it also occurs to me that you may be only the third per­son ever to draw Goodguy, at least for pub­li­ca­tion, and maybe for any rea­son. Han­ley him­self, of course, was the first. And Mar­ty Greim’s COMIC CRUSADER STORYBOOK fea­tured a full-page of Goodguy by Schaf­fen­berg­er. If there were ever any oth­er artists who drew the char­ac­ter, I either don’t recall or don’t know of them. I sus­pect that no one else did. So that’s anoth­er plus for this excel­lent piece of artwork!

    Reply
    1. Mark Post author

      Huh! I did­n’t know that. If so, it’s a nice distinction!
      The idea of the exis­tence of a Schaf­fen­berg­er ver­sion got me curi­ous, so I did some googling, but no luck turn­ing up any­thing. That would be very inter­est­ing to see!

      Reply

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