Longtime visitors to this blog might know that I was a regular contributor to Big Bang Comics back in the day. I had lots of fun being a part of that! On his blog over on the Big Bang Comics site, Big Bang co-founder Gary Carlson has been writing an article about each issue that came out, in publication order. He just made it up to #8, which ended up featuring a character named Mister U.S. (co-created by writer Nat Gertler and I). You can read all about it here.
Just so there’s something to look at here, I’ve put up a color guide I did for one of the variant covers. Back in those days, I wasn’t using Photoshop yet, so this was all done using markers and watercolors, then marking up the page with the CMYK color formulae I wanted for each color. Aside from that, between Gary and Nat, they’ve covered the rest of the story pretty well, and I don’t want to spoil anything here. But it’s worth checking out, if you’re curious about the “secret origin” of this issue and how it came to be.
Nicely done, as always, Mark. This awakens some nostalgia in me for the Big Bang line, which was always a lot of fun.
Yeah, Big Bang was a lot of fun, both as a creative contributor as well as just reading what Gary and other contributors were doing. I look back on those books very fondly.
As I mentioned in my post, Gary’s doing a chronological writeup of the story behind each Big Bang issue over at Big Bang Comics . You might enjoy checking those out, as he goes.