Tag Archives: Comic Cover Recreation/Reinterpretation

A Whole Buncha Stars Here,…You Bet!

I’ve men­tioned before how some­times ideas for art kind of come at me from ran­dom direc­tions, and cer­tain ideas will stick in my head until I do some­thing about them. This is one of those.

Most fans of comics and comics his­to­ry will rec­og­nize the sig­nif­i­cance of All Star Comics. Espe­cial­ly issue #3: it was the first appear­ance of the Jus­tice Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca! The cov­er for #3 is well-known, as it’s been re-cre­at­ed and repur­posed by a num­ber of oth­er artists over the years. I even did it myself once some years back for an FCA cov­er (Faw­cett Col­lec­tors of Amer­i­ca), replac­ing the DC heroes with Fawcett’s.

Less famil­iar are the issues pri­or to #3. I guess once DC had pub­lished Archive Edi­tions con­tain­ing every issue from All Star #3 for­ward, it was decid­ed that they prob­a­bly should com­plete the set and put out an Archive col­lect­ing the first two issues, before the title became about the Jus­tice Soci­ety. Hence vol­ume #0.

On a recent reread of that vol­ume, I was struck by the cov­er of All Star #1. The pub­lished cov­er seemed an after­thought: using exist­ing art pho­to­stat­ted from pre­vi­ous sto­ries and past­ed up, the char­ac­ters look­ing tiny and con­strict­ed in the lay­out. Maybe the issue was run­ning close to the dead­line when they real­ized they still need­ed a cov­er. I start­ed to think, “What might it have looked like if they’d had more time to put it together?”

And as men­tioned up top, the idea stuck, and the only way to get it out of my head was to actu­al­ly do it! So here’s my take on it.

Hope you enjoy it!

Monkey Business

Lancelot Link cover based on Steranko's Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.IE.L.D #6 cover.Hm. How best to explain this thing?

Peri­od­i­cal­ly online, you see that age-old ques­tion pop up again: “Where do ideas come from?” Just speak­ing for myself, they can strike at very odd times. This one hit me as I was dri­ving up I‑5 one day to go vis­it a friend. Just, “boom,” there it was in my brain. And as I’ve men­tioned before, some­times an idea will just lodge itself in my brain, and I can’t get it out unless I actu­al­ly do it. So here it is.

Some of you will know that Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp was a live action Sat­ur­day morn­ing show where they put a bunch of chim­panzees in cos­tumes and filmed them. I think I read some­where that they gave them food or some kind of chew­ing gum to get their mouths mov­ing, and then the voice actors would lat­er dub in their parts, try­ing to get some sem­blance of lip sync. I’m pret­ty sure it’s not exact­ly a show you could do today, for a num­ber of reasons.

Many will also real­ize that this is a re-cre­ation/rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the cov­er of Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. #6, by Jim Ster­anko. Apolo­gies to Mr. Ster­anko, whom I have noth­ing but respect for, but I had to get this out of my brain!

It’s a Gold Key cov­er, and not Mar­vel, because Gold Key was the com­pa­ny who held pret­ty much all the comics licens­es to all the Sat­ur­day morn­ing shows at this point. They actu­al­ly pub­lished Lancelot Link comics back then. Those who’ve seen the show might be won­der­ing, “What’s with the red hair? He did­n’t have that on TV.” The artists drew him that way in the com­ic (I’m guess­ing to make him more visu­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able among all the oth­er chimps in the sto­ries), so I fol­lowed their lead.

This image end­ed up being a lot more com­pli­cat­ed to exe­cute than I had orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned in my mind. Some­times I think I must have some kind of a masochis­tic streak as an artist. Often I’ll get deep in the midst of things like this, find it more com­plex and involved than I expect­ed, and think, “Why do I always do this to myself?” I’m sure I can’t be the only artist who does this.

Hope you enjoy my silli­ness here!

Drawn in Quarters

A con­fes­sion: I have a bit of a soft spot for some of the more odd­ball comics char­ac­ters out there. This won’t come as any big sur­prise to those of you who’ve vis­it­ed this site reg­u­lar­ly, but there you go. And they don’t get much odd­er than Ultra, the Multi-Alien.

Ultra was a late arrival to DC’s Mys­tery in Space com­ic. His ori­gin is all but spelled out on the cov­er of his first appear­ance, which I’ve re-cre­at­ed here. DC had some­thing of a tra­di­tion of sci fi/space heroes, and Ultra def­i­nite­ly fit into that tra­di­tion. He starts off in this first sto­ry as space­man Ace Arn, from Earth. These four aliens, from the plan­ets Ulla, Laroo, Tra­go and Raa­gan, each have spe­cial ray guns, designed to trans­form who­ev­er they fire them on into a mem­ber of their own respec­tive alien species. This being will then be under the con­trol of the one who shot them. Don’t ask me to explain why this is a goal to be desired. I don’t know; I’m get­ting con­fused typ­ing this.

Ace Arn is forced to crash-land on the plan­et where these four aliens are hid­ing out. And (by a fur­ther stroke of fate or coin­ci­dence only pos­si­ble in comics) all four fire their guns at him at the exact same instant, caus­ing him to be trans­formed par­tial­ly into being like all of them. Only con­trary to their plans, he retains his own will, and abrupt­ly rounds up the bad guys, some­how instant­ly know­ing how to use all these pow­ers he nev­er had before. Tak­ing the first let­ter from the names of each of their plan­ets (Ulla, Laroo, Trago and Raagan), he adds an “A” for his own name, tak­ing on a new iden­ti­ty as Ultra. I did say this was odd, did­n’t I?

The art for the strip was cre­at­ed by Lee Elias. About 20 years ear­li­er, he had done real­ly great work for Har­vey Comics on their Black Cat com­ic (I took a shot at the char­ac­ter myself here). I have no inside aware­ness as to the think­ing behind the cre­ation of Ultra, but I do have some guess­es about it. As men­tioned, this strip appeared late in Mys­tery in Space’s run. I sus­pect sales were flag­ging, and they were look­ing for a poten­tial new “anchor” strip that would cap­ture enough read­er inter­est to bol­ster their sales.

As DC sci fi strips go, though, this was real­ly dif­fer­ent. On the face of things, Ultra was kind of a mon­ster char­ac­ter, some­thing very unlike most oth­er DC char­ac­ters. Again, guess­ing: mon­ster-mania was still very much in effect in pop cul­ture at the time. You had shows like The Mun­sters and The Addams Fam­i­ly on TV, along with all the late night mon­ster movies, mod­el kits and toys. So per­haps Ultra was an attempt to tap into some of that.

Mys­tery in Space was can­celed with issue #110, so Ultra must not have caught on with read­ers as much as DC had hoped. But there’s often some­thing fun about odd­ball char­ac­ters like Ultra, despite (or maybe because of) their odd­i­ty. I’ve always had a soft spot for the guy ever since the first time I saw him as a kid.

Hence my re-cre­ation/re-inter­pre­ta­tion. As is usu­al with any of these, I’ve made some changes. For me, that’s the only point in doing re-cre­ations, if I can find some kind of fresh spin to put on them. If you care to study it and com­pare it to the orig­i­nal, there’s one big change (that’s kind of a hint), and a num­ber of small ones too.

Hope you enjoy my lit­tle self-indul­gence here. 🙂

The Captain and the King

If you’ve vis­it­ed my site before, you might know that awhile back I was dubbed the de fac­to “cov­er edi­tor” for FCA (the Faw­cett Col­lec­tors of Amer­i­ca), a “mag­a­zine with­in a mag­a­zine,” appear­ing in Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego (pub­lished by TwoM­or­rows). Occa­sion­al­ly, I actu­al­ly do a cov­er myself (like the one you see here). This time, I not only did the cov­er for this upcom­ing issue, I also wrote the article!

The issue of Alter Ego in ques­tion is focused on comics creator/writer/artist Jack Kir­by. Most of you know that he did work for Mar­vel and DC, and maybe you’re even aware that he did a hand­ful of work for oth­er pub­lish­ers too. But per­haps you don’t know that he also did work for Faw­cett, and fair­ly ear­ly on! That’s what my arti­cle is about. FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck knows I’m a big Kir­by fan, so he reached out and asked me if I’d like to write this.

When most peo­ple think of the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel, they prob­a­bly recall the work of C.C. Beck (whom I am also a big fan of). But many don’t know that Joe Simon and Jack Kir­by also worked on Cap­tain Mar­vel, and very ear­ly on in his existence.

I go into more detail in the arti­cle, but the short ver­sion is that Faw­cett could see they had some­thing big going on with Cap­tain Mar­vel in Whiz Comics (a title he shared with oth­er char­ac­ters), and they real­ized it would be a real­ly good idea to also have a reg­u­lar ongo­ing solo title fea­tur­ing Cap­tain Mar­vel. Faw­cett’s first stab at this appears to be a book called Spe­cial Edi­tion Comics. They did­n’t do anoth­er one of those, and my guess is that Beck told them he could­n’t do both that and Whiz Comics by him­self sus­tain­ably over the long haul, so they regrouped.

Deter­mined to find a way to make this hap­pen, their next attempt was Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures, and for the first issue, they reached out to the star comics team of Joe Simon and Jack Kir­by. Simon and Kir­by were already work­ing full time for anoth­er pub­lish­er, but they took on this chal­lenge (work­ing after hours) with­out let­ting any­one know about it back on the day job.

The result is some­thing I deal with in the arti­cle, but when it came time for a cov­er for this issue of FCA, I had some thoughts. The real cov­er to Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures #1 strikes me as look­ing odd­ly like an after­thought, as if the edi­tors went, “Whoops! This needs to go to press now, and we for­got to have any­one do a cov­er!” I thought at first that it might be just a pho­to­stat of an exist­ing Cap­tain Mar­vel run­ning fig­ure, but P.C. Hamer­linck was told by Beck him­self that some­one came to him one day in the office, said they need­ed this draw­ing “right now,” and he just did it. The cov­er does­n’t even have a prop­er logo! They just slapped some type­set­ting across the front of it.

So my thought was, “What if instead of being an appar­ent last minute after­thought, they had Kir­by do the cov­er?” One of the sto­ries in par­tic­u­lar seemed to lend itself pret­ty well to the kinds of cov­ers he was draw­ing around this time peri­od, so that’s what I went with. I’ve done draw­ings like Kir­by before (you can find some of them around here on my site). But this cov­er was a real chal­lenge, because in this com­ic, Kir­by and Simon were try­ing hard to do their ver­sion of Beck. So in effect, I had to imi­tate an artist while he was imi­tat­ing anoth­er artist! I’ve nev­er done that before. It was a bit of a brain-bender.

I hope you like the result, and if you’re inter­est­ed in read­ing the whole sto­ry, check out the article! 

Venus Makes a Timely Appearance

When you’re a comics geek, and you’ve also had a few cours­es in Art His­to­ry, I sup­pose you’re liable to occa­sion­al­ly come up with stuff like this.

Some of you know that before Mar­vel Comics set­tled on that name, the pub­lish­er went by a cou­ple oth­er names. They start­ed off as Time­ly, then lat­er changed to Atlas in the ear­ly ’50s, before final­ly set­tling on Mar­vel in 1961 (Though as you can see from this image, they did briefly toy with using the name ear­li­er). While I know a bit about Time­ly’s out­put dur­ing the War, I must admit that my aware­ness of their out­put post-WWII is very spot­ty. It’s not like Mar­vel has often reprint­ed that material.

Once the War was over, gen­er­al read­er inter­est in super­heroes seemed to fade, and all comics pub­lish­ers were look­ing to find new mate­r­i­al that would cap­ture read­er inter­est (AKA sales). Venus appears to have been one of Time­ly’s attempts at this. While I have not been able to actu­al­ly read any of these comics, when you look at the cov­ers, the title appears to suf­fer from some­thing of a mul­ti­ple per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. It’s not quite sure exact­ly what it wants to be.

The book starts off look­ing like some sort of comedic romance title, then lat­er shifts into some kind of qua­si-hor­ror/mys­tery title. It was like they start­ed off with an idea, found the book was­n’t quite sell­ing the way they’d hoped, so they tried tin­ker­ing and throw­ing dif­fer­ent things at the wall while still pub­lish­ing it, to see if some­thing else might stick.

Any­way, look­ing at the Venus cov­ers, I remem­bered Bot­ti­cel­li’s “Birth of Venus” from my Art His­to­ry class­es, and it occurred to me that per­haps Time­ly had missed a bet by not hav­ing an artist do some sort of an homage to that paint­ing on a cov­er. So I thought maybe I’d rec­ti­fy that (70-some years lat­er), just for the heck of it. Maybe that was too “high brow” of an idea for them to both­er with. Maybe it still is, but I had to try it out (and get the idea out of my head). Hope you folks like it.

I Dare You!

There’s a sto­ry behind this one. Of course! Isn’t there always? 😀

But first; there are prob­a­bly some of you scratch­ing your heads, going, “Huh? That’s not Dare­dev­il!” It’s under­stand­able that you might only know about Mar­vel Comics’ ver­sion of Dare­dev­il, from the comics and the recent Net­flix series. But back in the Gold­en Age of comics, there was a dif­fer­ent Dare­dev­il, pub­lished by Lev Glea­son. The char­ac­ter’s title sold very well, run­ning for about 16 years, until sales fell (like many super­hero titles did post-WWII). This Dare­dev­il had a kid gang who hung around with him called the Lit­tle Wise Guys. The boys had tak­en over his title by the time the book ceased pub­lish­ing, Dare­dev­il him­self hav­ing gone MIA about six years pri­or to that.

But I should get back to the sto­ry behind this re-cre­ation/rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. Ear­li­er this year, I was chat­ting with direc­tor Dan Riba (known for his work on Bat­man: the Ani­mat­ed Series, among many oth­er car­toons). In the course of our con­ver­sa­tion, he men­tioned that he’d recent­ly had an online inter­ac­tion with movie pro­duc­er Michael Uslan, via the Book of Faces. Some­where out there on the inter­net, Mr. Uslan had stum­bled across my ear­li­er re-work­ing of Mar­vel’s Cap­tain Mar­vel #1, replac­ing the Kree ver­sion with the Gold­en Age Faw­cett orig­i­nal, as if Mar­vel had bought the rights to the char­ac­ter from Fawcett.

Dan told me that Mr. Uslan liked my cov­er, but did­n’t know where it had come from (The inter­net some­times has a way of strip­ping us cre­ative folk of cred­it for our work). Dan informed him that it was my work. In reply, Mr. Uslan won­dered if I had ever con­sid­ered doing a sim­i­lar thing with Dare­dev­il #1, rework­ing it as if in some alter­nate uni­verse, Mar­vel had bought the rights to the orig­i­nal Gold­en Age char­ac­ter instead of invent­ing their own new ver­sion. (Some­where, I read that this was actu­al­ly con­sid­ered briefly).

I told Dan that I had­n’t thought of that, but it was an inter­est­ing idea. The con­ver­sa­tion moved on from there, and I did­n’t think about it again. At least not for a lit­tle while. But this thought kept peri­od­i­cal­ly cir­cling back into my brain. And as occa­sion­al­ly hap­pens, it got lodged in there. When that hap­pens, I’ve found the only way to get it out is to actu­al­ly do the thing. So here it is!

Re-cre­at­ing and re-imag­in­ing this cov­er was a much big­ger chal­lenge than my Cap­tain Mar­vel #1 was. In the process of dig­ging in and work­ing with a cov­er image like this, you come to real­ize cer­tain things about it. One is that for a Mar­vel Comics cov­er of this vin­tage, it’s a very busy cov­er! It’s almost more like a DC Annu­al or 80-Page Giant cov­er of that era.

I have a the­o­ry about the rea­son why this cov­er is so unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly busy for Mar­vel. It’s only a guess, mind you, but I sus­pect that orig­i­nal­ly the cov­er was going to be just the pri­ma­ry image at left. That part looks to have been drawn by Jack Kir­by, while there are oth­er hands in the rest of the art. Three of the Fan­tas­tic Four heads are just the paste-up art they used in that comic’s cor­ner box! I can’t help but won­der if some­one (per­haps Stan Lee, or maybe Mar­tin Good­man) felt like this new title need­ed more of a sales boost than just the one image, so the main piece of art was reduced and shoved to the left, and all the addi­tion­al text men­tion­ing Spi­der-Man and the Fan­tas­tic Four was added in that col­umn on the right.

Adding to my sus­pi­cions are all the tan­gents that exist­ed on the orig­i­nal, which I made an effort to fix here. They feel like the sort of thing that hap­pens when art is re-worked after the fact by oth­er hands, in ways the ini­tial artist did­n’t plan for.

There are a cou­ple addi­tion­al things I should men­tion, because of course there are sto­ry bits about this new/old ver­sion that I worked out in my head while doing this cov­er. I fig­ure Mar­vel might have giv­en Dare­dev­il fold-up boomerangs that he could store in his belt (see dia­gram). And at first I was­n’t sure what to do with the spot at low­er right where Fog­gy Nel­son was on the orig­i­nal cov­er. Who could I put there? But as I thought about it, the idea of aging up the Lit­tle Wise Guys to teenagers (ala Rick Jones), and hav­ing them form a band seemed like a good way to go. They’re rep­re­sent­ed here by Scare­crow. It was­n’t too hard to take his hair­cut from his Gold­en Age look and turn it into more of a Bea­t­le cut.

Thanks to Mr. Uslan and Dan for plant­i­ng the bug in my brain!

Art Vs. Artist!

So there’s this thing, and I guess all the cool kids are doing it over on the Twit­ters and the Insta­grams. It’s called “Art Vs. Artist.” You put some of your work togeth­er in this for­mat, along with a pic­ture of your­self in the cen­ter. It seemed like some­thing that might be sor­ta fun to take a crack at, so here we go!

To be hon­est, I’m not entire­ly sure what all the rules are (if there are any), so I’m prob­a­bly break­ing some of them. I did get the idea that this was sup­posed to cen­ter around faces, so there’s at least that. Some of these sam­ples are more recent and oth­ers slight­ly old­er. At the moment, I feel like this works pret­ty well. If I were to attempt this again tomor­row, it’s pos­si­ble I could pick a few oth­er images.

I feel like I might be break­ing one of the rules with my pho­to in the cen­ter. It’s (obvi­ous­ly) not a cur­rent self­ie. Not by a long shot! That’s a 12 year-old me, on my birth­day. If you could see more of the pic­ture, you’d see I was attempt­ing to paint a pic­ture (using oils) of the USS Enter­prise fir­ing on a Klin­gon ship. Why that pho­to? I fig­ure: don’t we all start some­place like that as artists? Every­thing else flows from that.

When Titans Clash!

Long­time vis­i­tors to this site may remem­ber that I got my start in ani­ma­tion work­ing on X‑Men: the Ani­mat­ed Series. That meant my first boss was Lar­ry Hous­ton, who I came to con­sid­er both my men­tor in the busi­ness, and a friend. Lar­ry’s now get­ting to enjoy much-deserved recog­ni­tion for his con­tri­bu­tions to X‑Men, as well as a num­ber of oth­er car­toons peo­ple think of fond­ly from their youth.

But before he got into ani­ma­tion, Lar­ry aspired to do comics. And he did! In his 20’s, he self-pub­lished three issues of his own com­ic, The Enforcers, with a lit­tle help from his friends.

Those comics have been out of print for years. But not long ago, Lar­ry decid­ed to re-pub­lish them all togeth­er in one big col­lec­tion. You can pur­chase it off of Lar­ry’s site, using the link above, in either dig­i­tal or phys­i­cal form. Orig­i­nal­ly his comics were in black and white (as was typ­i­cal for inde­pen­dent comics in those days), but this time it’s in full color!

I ordered myself a copy, and I found it a real blast. You can feel the excite­ment on the page, that “we’re doing our own comics!” Of course there are some rough edges, but you can see Lar­ry and friends learn­ing their craft and improv­ing vis­i­bly with each issue. It’s cer­tain­ly bet­ter than what I was doing in my 20’s! The art has a real ener­gy to it, and so does the dia­logue. There’s this ’70s Mar­vel/qua­si-Roy Thomas feel to it. I real­ly enjoyed the com­ic quite a bit!

So this is a bit of fan art on my part, recre­at­ing the cov­er of the col­lec­tion (which was also the cov­er to the orig­i­nal issue #3). But of course, it’s not just a straight re-cre­ation. I always have to have some kind of spin on it, or re-inter­pre­ta­tion. In this case, the idea was to tweak it slight­ly in some aspects to make it look even more like a main­stream com­ic from that late ’70s peri­od. Except for one or two pan­els, these sto­ries feel like they could have seen print in a Comics Code-approved book of that era.

So Lar­ry: thanks, and much respect always! Hav­ing read these sto­ries, I’d real­ly like to see you do some new comics with your char­ac­ters, using all the sto­ry­telling craft you’ve picked up in the inter­ven­ing years.

Lar­ry Hous­ton’s The Enforcers are ™ & ©1975, 1978, 1979 and 2018 Lar­ry F. Houston.

Captains All!

Some of you will rec­og­nize this as a re-cre­ation/rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the cov­er of Whiz Comics #2, first appear­ance of the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Mar­vel in the Gold­en Age.

This was inspired by a sto­ry a friend told me a few weeks back. Like me, his default set­ting when some­one says “Cap­tain Mar­vel” is to think first of the Faw­cett Comics orig­i­nal. His wife does­n’t par­tic­u­lar­ly read a lot of comics, but she’s famil­iar with the char­ac­ter through him. Recent­ly, he and his wife were out at the movies. They were look­ing at the posters for com­ing attrac­tions. One was for Mar­vel’s Cap­tain Mar­vel film. My friend’s wife looked at the poster and was puz­zled. “Um, why is Cap­tain Mar­vel a girl?”

Look­ing around online, there seems to be more than one per­son out there who’s a lit­tle con­fused as to why these dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters have the same name. I’ve seen forums where this ques­tion’s been asked. Peo­ple who know what’s going on try to explain, only to per­haps go into too much detail, caus­ing the eyes of those who asked the ques­tion to glaze over and regret their hav­ing asked. So I’m not going to get into all that here.

This just appealed to my sense of fun to make this swap. It’s not like I haven’t made a char­ac­ter swap like this before! I’ve even swapped pub­lish­ers on this one. In my mind, this would’ve been pub­lished by Timely/Marvel. I even gave the Cap­tain a new/old logo, in line with the kind of logos they used back then.

And like many of you, I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing what Mar­vel has done with their Cap­tain Mar­vel in the movie!

What They Shoulda Done,…”

FCA Captain Marvel Adventures #23 Cover Re-creationThis is a re-cre­ation/re-inter­pre­ta­tion of the cov­er of Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures #23, done in col­lab­o­ra­tion with my friend and ani­ma­tion biz men­tor, Lar­ry Hous­ton. You’ll note there are some sig­nif­i­cant changes, if you com­pare this cov­er to the orig­i­nal.

This re-cre­ation came about because of an upcom­ing issue of FCA (the Faw­cett Col­lec­tors of Amer­i­ca), with an arti­cle dis­cussing minor­i­ty rep­re­sen­ta­tion in Gold­en Age comics. Since the arti­cle’s appear­ing in FCA, the pri­ma­ry focus was to be on Steam­boat, an African-Amer­i­can char­ac­ter who appeared for a while in the ear­ly Cap­tain Mar­vel strips.

Now, fea­tur­ing Steam­boat pre­sent­ed a prob­lem. He was always depict­ed in that stereo­typ­i­cal and racist way that most African-Amer­i­can char­ac­ters were por­trayed in comics at the time. So what were we to do about a cov­er for this issue?

Nei­ther FCA Edi­tor P.C. Hamer­linck nor myself thought it was a good idea to use images of Steam­boat from the orig­i­nal comics on the cov­er, and for the same rea­sons, I did­n’t feel right in ask­ing an artist to gen­er­ate new art depict­ing him as he appeared back then.

Anoth­er thought was to do a new draw­ing depict­ing Steam­boat in a non-racist way. But then that raised the ques­tion of how peo­ple would even be able to rec­og­nize who he was sup­posed to be, since it would be so far afield from his orig­i­nal appearance.

P.C. came up with the idea of doing a re-cre­ation of Cap­tain Mar­vel Adven­tures #23, only done in a sort of “what if there weren’t the racial stereo­types in old comics?” kind of way. Look­ing over the orig­i­nal cov­er and its ele­ments, I real­ized this was the way to go. We could make this idea work. Even though Steam­boat would look dif­fer­ent from how he’d been por­trayed in the Gold­en Age, read­ers would still be able to iden­ti­fy him because there was a con­text for it.

I’d also been think­ing of try­ing to get some new and dif­fer­ent voic­es involved in some of these FCA cov­ers. Though Lar­ry Hous­ton is prob­a­bly best known for his ani­ma­tion work, he’s always had a deep love for comics too. And I knew that pos­i­tive por­tray­als of African-Amer­i­can char­ac­ters in car­toons and comics has always been a sub­ject Lar­ry cared a great deal about. So I thought maybe this cov­er could be a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to team up with Lar­ry. I asked him if he’d be inter­est­ed, and he agreed to do it.

Lar­ry pro­vid­ed me with a good, tight lay­out, which I took the rest of the way, even adding dot pat­terns and aging.

You get to see it here as the com­ic cov­er alone, sans the FCA copy. This issue of FCA (#203) will be appear­ing in the pages of Roy Thomas’ Alter Ego #144, out in Decem­ber from Twomorrows.