Monthly Archives: December 2018

Weird Colors

It was recent­ly point­ed out to me that in Sav­age Drag­on #235, Erik Larsen had reprint­ed a bit of my old Big Bang Comics work. This was orig­i­nal­ly part of a larg­er sto­ry­line (I believe called “The Time­bomber”) spread over three issues, where Erik had loaned Big Bang Edi­tor Gary Carl­son the use of his Sav­age Drag­on char­ac­ter, and Drag­on was being bounced around through time, inter­act­ing with mul­ti­ple Big Bang char­ac­ters in dif­fer­ent eras. 

Gary had me con­tribut­ing to this sto­ry in sev­er­al ways, but the one that’s rel­e­vant here is that I pen­ciled and let­tered a three page seg­ment (nice­ly inked by Patrick Tuller), where Drag­on met up with Big Bang’s Dr. Weird. It orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Big Bang Comics #12. I chose to draw it in the style of Gold­en Age comics artist Bernard Bai­ly, prob­a­bly best known for his work on DC’s Spec­tre and Hour-Man strips. I also attempt­ed to match the let­ter­ing seen on those strips, which I’d assume is Bai­ly’s, but I don’t know for certain.

Back when I was orig­i­nal­ly work­ing on this, there were hopes that the issue might be print­ed in col­or, but it end­ed up in b/w. Because there had been that chance though, I actu­al­ly had done some col­or guides for the seg­ment, and I think I mailed col­or pho­to­copies of them to Gary.

Fast for­ward to this three-pager’s appear­ance in Sav­age Drag­on #235: Final­ly it gets to be seen in col­or! Even if any­one had remem­bered their exis­tence, the copies of my orig­i­nal col­or guides were like­ly nowhere to be found, so this was recol­ored from scratch. I thought per­haps vis­i­tors here might enjoy com­par­ing the two ver­sions, see­ing where some choic­es are the same, and oth­ers are different.

Just a cou­ple of comments/observations about the new ver­sion. I appre­ci­ate the fact that the col­orist who did this for re-pub­li­ca­tion stuck with the old school col­or palette. When you’re try­ing to do some­thing that looks and feels like a gen­uine old com­ic, noth­ing ruins the illu­sion faster than a col­or approach that isn’t from that time period!

Also, I noticed that a sort of end­ing cap­tion was added at the end of page 3 that was­n’t part of the orig­i­nal. Who­ev­er did it either recy­cled por­tions of the let­ter­ing I had done ear­li­er in the sto­ry to get what they need­ed, or attempt­ed to let­ter it from scratch so that it looked like my faux Bernard Bai­ly let­ter­ing. Either way: again, try­ing to pre­serve the illu­sion that this was the real deal. So: thumbs up for all of that!

 

This Is the Dawning of the Age of the Croods…”

So it occurs to me it’s been awhile since I post­ed any of my sto­ry­board revi­sion work. As I’ve said before, the dif­fi­cul­ty with that kind of work is that you’re gen­er­al­ly just adding bits and pieces here and there. But I’ve got a cou­ple sam­ples of scenes from the show Dawn of the Croods that I worked on for Dream­Works. You can kind of spot my work by the non-pho­to blue underdrawing.

One of the things that I’ve found over my time in ani­ma­tion is that every so often you have those projects that stand out…in a good way! They are spe­cial. You have a blast work­ing on them and real­ize, “Ohh! This is why I got into ani­ma­tion!” Dawn of the Croods was one of those for me!

Part of it was def­i­nite­ly the mate­r­i­al. It was so much fun get­ting to do some of the out­right goofy things we did. I loved mak­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the char­ac­ters’ act­ing. But the oth­er part of it was the peo­ple. We had a real­ly great bunch of peo­ple on that show! It was such a good expe­ri­ence, all the way around.

To my Croods Croo: all the best! Love and respect always,

Mark