Jeff Bonivert’s Atomic Man

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Atomic-Man“And now, for some­thing com­plete­ly different!”

I’m dig­ging deep for this one. The ’80s saw a lot of inter­est­ing, fun, odd, inde­pen­dent comics. Jeff Bonivert’s Atom­ic Man Comics was one of them.

I don’t remem­ber just how I first encoun­tered Jeff Bonivert’s work, but it most def­i­nite­ly caught my eye. It’s unique for the abstract geo­met­ric and graph­ic way he approach­es his draw­ings. I pick up a bit of an art deco or stream­lined feel to it in places. There’s no mis­tak­ing his work for any­one else’s.

I believe that like me, Jeff is from the Bay Area. There was a time in the ’80s when we even worked at the same place, but unfor­tu­nate­ly I nev­er got to meet him and talk comics (it was a pret­ty big place).

I some­how man­aged to get all three issues of Jef­f’s Atom­ic Man Comics back when they came out, and there’s a def­i­nite sense of fun to the pro­ceed­ings. Atom­ic Man is real­ly kind of a clas­sic-style comics hero. He has super-strength and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, but does­n’t appear to have any oth­er super­pow­ers beyond that. Jeff added some fresh ideas to the mix, in that Atom­ic Man is hap­pi­ly mar­ried, with two kids, liv­ing in San Fran­cis­co. Being from the Bay Area, that last part sort of mat­tered to me, because it seems like the tra­di­tion­al default for most super­heroes has been to base them in NYC (or some fic­ti­tious NYC surrogate).

For my Atom­ic Man salute, I thought a styl­is­tic exper­i­ment using Adobe Illus­tra­tor might be a good way of attempt­ing some­thing that could evoke the look of Jeff Bonivert’s work.

Atom­ic Man is ™ and © 2014 Jeff Bonivert.

11 thoughts on “Jeff Bonivert’s Atomic Man”

  1. John G. Pierce

    Some­where along the line I might have heard of this fea­ture, but I’m not sure. Looks inter­est­ing, in any event, though I have some­what of a dis­like for heads which are way out of pro­por­tion to bod­ies, even in car­toon art.

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    1. Mark Post author

      Jeff has done a num­ber of oth­er cool things too. In my col­lec­tion, I have an issue of Michael Gilbert’s Doc Stearn…Mr. Mon­ster where Jeff did the cov­er as well as inte­ri­or seg­ments depict­ing Mr. Mon­ster trapped in “Dimen­sion X.” There’s also the Fun Boys Spring Spe­cial pub­lished by Tun­dra, con­tain­ing the adven­tures of a trio of young comics fans set in the early/mid ’60s. A good time to be a comics fan, I’m think­ing you’ll agree!

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    1. Mark Post author

      Jeff,

      Wow! It’s great to final­ly meet you, albeit via the inter­net. Thanks much for stop­ping by! I’m huge­ly flat­tered that you enjoyed my take on your Atom­ic Man. I’d love to see more of him again (what­ev­er did hap­pen to Zak and Rudolff, after they were abduct­ed by Giz­mo?). Or any oth­er new comics you might have up your sleeve, for that matter!

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      1. Jeff Bonivert

        Atom­ic Man was can­celled while I was pen­cilling issue four. So there are the first few pages still in pen­cil that no one has ever seen. There was a con­clu­sion to the first sto­ry arc, we just nev­er got that far. You can find me on Face­book where I post cur­rent sketch­es and com­plet­ed stuff, and have a few albums of sto­ry ideas I have been try­ing to sell for a while, ETC.

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        1. Mark Post author

          Sounds very cool. I’m actu­al­ly not on the Book of Faces myself, but it’s great to hear you’re still at it! I did enjoy see­ing some of your new(er) stuff over in the web­comics sec­tion of Fly­ing Col­ors Comics’ web­site. I’m sure you’ll agree that in many ways, today’s a very dif­fer­ent comics mar­ket now from what it was back when you orig­i­nal­ly did Atom­ic Man Comics.

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    1. Mark Post author

      Cool! Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to try to lay hands on a copy. Hope­ful­ly oth­er vis­i­tors here will also check it out.

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  4. Joe musich

    Wow, years lat­er I find out about the char­ac­ter and your ter­rif­ic ren­di­tion. Thanks for the tip. I would have grabbed issue two if I would have seen it on the racks for sure. Thanks.

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    1. Mark Post author

      There were actu­al­ly three issues that were pub­lished before Black­thorne had to pull the plug. And as Jeff him­self said here, he had start­ed work­ing on the fourth when the word came down.

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    2. Mark Post author

      There were actu­al­ly three issues pub­lished before Black­thorne pulled the plug, and as Jeff said here, he had start­ed work­ing on the fourth issue when he got the word to stop working.

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