Author Archives: Mark

How to Care for Your Monster

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Here’s anoth­er “inspi­ra­tional stuff” post for you. It isn’t about a com­ic this time, but a book. One that I’m not even sure is in print any­more. But if not, it should be.

I came across this book called How to Care for Your Mon­ster when I was about 9 or 10 years old. As a kid, there are often cool things which cross your path and cap­ture your atten­tion for a while. Every so often though, you get your hands on some­thing and real­ize that not only do you think it’s cool now, you know for a fact that you will still think it’s cool even when you’re an adult. And How to Care for Your Mon­ster was one of those things for me.

The book was writ­ten and drawn by Nel­son Brid­well (the same guy respon­si­ble for Clif­ford the Big Red Dog, I believe). The con­cept was pret­ty clever; talk­ing about var­i­ous types of clas­sic mon­sters as if they were pets, serv­ing as a guide to the do’s and don’ts of car­ing for them. The humor is even mild­ly bent at points, in a way that I’m not sure a mod­ern kids’ book could get away with. I thought this book was great then, and I still think so now!

The draw­ing above is my attempt (I put the empha­sis on the word “attempt”) at try­ing to cap­ture the style and feel of the illus­tra­tions in the book. “Fan art,” kin­da. I prob­a­bly should’ve just drawn this in my own style, but my ani­ma­tion train­ing com­pelled me to attempt to put it on-mod­el. Still, it was an inter­est­ing experiment.

Any­way, it’s a real­ly fun book. If you ever come across a used copy at a rea­son­able price, give it a look! As a pub­lic ser­vice, I’m post­ing a scan at right of the cov­er of my very own much-loved copy that I’ve hung onto for all these years, so you’ll know what you’re look­ing for. Don’t say I nev­er did any­thing for you!

How to Care for Your Mon­ster is ©1970 Nor­man Bridwell.

 

Zita the Spacegirl

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Before talk­ing about the illus­tra­tion at right, I need to set the stage and explain what I’m doing here. Please bear with me.

It will come as no sur­prise (if you know me, or have looked around my site) that I’m a long-time fan of comics. It’s a top­ic I can go on at length about (and have, at times!). Now there are a lot of things I real­ly have no use for in mod­ern comics. But it’s way too easy to talk about those. It strikes me it’d be a waste of time and space for me to go rant­i­ng on my blog about what I don’t like in comics.

Instead, I thought it might be more worth­while to take a pos­i­tive tack and point out comics (or oth­er books and things) I’ve come across that I like, and have found inspir­ing. So from time to time, I’ll do posts about inspi­ra­tional stuff I’ve come across. It may be new, or some­thing old. But these are the kinds of things that remind me why I fell in love with comics (and car­toons and sto­ry­telling) in the first place. Maybe you’ll like them too.

For my first install­ment along those lines, here’s a bit of “fan art” I gen­er­at­ed of Zita the Space­girl. Cre­at­ed by artist/author Ben Hatke, I picked this book up a few weeks back. I’d pre-ordered it on a whim, based pure­ly on the cov­er art and the sto­ry descrip­tion. I was not dis­ap­point­ed. In full col­or and clock­ing in at over 180+ pages, it def­i­nite­ly qual­i­fies as a graph­ic nov­el. Hatke’s art is loaded with charm, and he’s craft­ed a sol­id all-ages book. Zita faces some chal­lenges and some hard choic­es that kids will under­stand, but per­haps adult read­ers will find addi­tion­al res­o­nance with (much like Pixar movies). I thor­ough­ly enjoyed the book. It’s the kind of thing that gives you hope for the future of comics.

Zita the Space­girl is ™ and © Ben Hatke.

UPDATE: You might notice in the Com­ments that Ben some­how dis­cov­ered my post here, and asked if he could re-post my Zita draw­ing over on his own blog. Which he did, along with a cou­ple oth­er cool Zita draw­ings. Thanks, Ben!

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!

PC News, Part V

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This is prob­a­bly the last of my PC News posts. Time to move out of the 80’s!

The first cov­er here was for an issue announc­ing that PC News was going the Desk­top Pub­lish­ing route. Things weren’t entire­ly dig­i­tal yet in those days; for exam­ple, we still had to paste up all the type the Mac was going to be burst­ing through here. Pho­to­shop did­n’t yet exist, so we did the mag­a­zine using Aldus Page­mak­er, Adobe Illus­tra­tor, Mac­Draw and Mac­Draft! Any non-dig­i­tal­ly-cre­at­ed art like this still had to be pho­to­stat­ted, then run through a smelly device called a wax­er (I don’t know if those things even exist any­more), so it could then be bur­nished by hand down onto the page.

The sec­ond cov­er was for a fea­tured arti­cle in a fol­lowup edi­tion, “The Pin­na­cles and Pit­falls of Desk­top Pub­lish­ing.” Because of course, since it was still ear­ly days with these machines, there were prob­lems you’d encounter. I remem­ber get­ting that screen with the bomb logo a num­ber of times! It was fun to come up with all the lurk­ing bugs here for this illustration.

And that’s it for now, from the Lab in 1985!

PC News, Part IV

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And here’s yet anoth­er PC News cov­er flashback.

Once again, I’m not real­ly sure what’s going on here. Too much water under the bridge since then. There’s a tick­le of a thought in the back of my mind that this might be rel­a­tive to some pro­gram called “Jazz,” though I’m not sure.

What­ev­er it is, I kind of liked how the illus­tra­tion came out for its own sake. Jazz musi­cians with old school Mac­in­tosh­es for heads? Works for me!

I think there’ll be one more of these cov­er posts to come.

PC News, Part III

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Still more PC News cov­er “flash­back-ing” in public.

This cov­er dealt with an astound­ing new con­cept: the idea of two com­put­ers being able to com­mu­ni­cate with each other…over phone lines! Isn’t mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy amaz­ing?

What?? Well, I did say in my first post on these that it was weird look­ing back at all these con­cepts that we take for grant­ed now. Don’t for­get: this was done around 1984/1985.

Still more to come.