Tag Archives: Fake Comic Cover

Behind the Badge

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Fake Comic Cover Red Hot Comics #14, with Big Bang Comics' the Badge and His RookiesLong­time vis­i­tors to my site might know that back in the ’90s, I was a con­trib­u­tor to Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er’s Big Bang Comics. The first issue had­n’t quite come out through Cal­iber yet when I came onboard, I  think, but some mate­r­i­al was already done.

When I met him, Gary was look­ing for some­one to draw a Simon & Kir­by type Gold­en Age char­ac­ter he had in mind called the Badge, and he’d been point­ed my way. I got to have a pret­ty good hand in devel­op­ing the char­ac­ter, his look and that of side­kicks Troop­er and Bob­bie, even mak­ing some sug­ges­tions about the char­ac­ters’ back sto­ries. So I have to admit to feel­ing a bit of pro­pri­etary inter­est in the Badge.

We even­tu­al­ly did a cou­ple issues of Big Bang sub­ti­tled “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics,” in imi­ta­tion of the Ster­anko His­to­ry of Comics vol­umes (not real­ly par­o­dy except in the most lov­ing and respect­ful way, because we all had a lot of affec­tion for those books, as they were a gate­way into a life­long inter­est in comics his­to­ry for many of us).

The His­to­ry issues end­ed up being Big Bang Comics #24 and #27. If you’ve seen the Ster­anko books, imi­tat­ing those meant we need­ed a whole bunch of fake cov­ers! So I and a num­ber of oth­er artists set about to gen­er­ate them. I recent­ly made a list, and was shocked to see just how many I did, while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly hold­ing down my day job in animation!

Any­way, to what you’re see­ing here: this was one of the ear­li­est fake cov­ers I gen­er­at­ed for Big Bang. If my mem­o­ry’s right, I think it might even have appeared as far back as the Cal­iber minis­eries. I recall it appear­ing in col­or, but small, like part of a back cov­er ad. Recent­ly, I thought it would be fun to go back and revis­it a num­ber of those old fake cov­ers I did, and give them the full col­or treat­ment they always called out for. Most have nev­er been seen in col­or at all!

The char­ac­ters along the left side were ones I just made up on the spot, but most of them end­ed up appear­ing in Big Bang sto­ries at one point or anoth­er. I sort of thought of Big Bang as “comics his­to­ry through a fun­house mir­ror,” and to that end when I was draw­ing up this cov­er, I just made up char­ac­ters that felt like they were play­ing with some of those famil­iar old Gold­en Age arche­types, but hope­ful­ly also feel­ing like you had­n’t entire­ly seen them before.

Pen­cils, let­ter­ing (and now col­or­ing) are mine; inks were by Jeff Mey­er (I believe), who inked sev­er­al of my fake cov­ers for the His­to­ry issues, and did a nice job of giv­ing them the cor­rect fin­ished look and feel. You can check out anoth­er of our fake cov­er col­lab­o­ra­tions here.

I still have oth­er cov­ers in the pipeline that I might post too, but I had­n’t put any­thing up here in awhile, and thought this might be fun. Hope you enjoy!

And thanks always, Gary, for let­ting me have a lot of fun on the Big Bang play­ground! Those inter­est­ed can check out more recent Big Bang issues over on Indy Plan­et.

The Adventures of Santa Claus

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Here’s one that’s been in my head since last Christ­mas, but there was too much going on then for me to get to it in time. So it feels good to final­ly get this real­ized this year!

I’ve always had a soft spot for those DC 80 Pg. Giants and 100 Pg. Super-Spec­tac­u­lars, and the idea of a some­what super­hero-style San­ta Claus 80 Pg. Giant com­ic sound­ed like a fun idea that need­ed to exist. And it’s a giv­en that Go-Go Checks auto­mat­i­cal­ly make any com­ic cov­er better!

Of course, there were a lot of pos­si­ble vil­lains to pick from, but ulti­mate­ly I grav­i­tat­ed towards these. For those who don’t know, Pitch comes from the 1959 Mex­i­can movie San­ta Claus. Voldar and Torg appear in the 1964 “clas­sic” San­ta Claus Con­quers the Mar­tians. The Heat Miser and the Snow Miser show up in the TV spe­cial, The Year With­out a San­ta Claus. And final­ly, Oogie Boo­gie comes from the Dis­ney clas­sic The Night­mare Before Christ­mas. Just real­ized: they’re all in chrono­log­i­cal order. I had­n’t real­ly planned it that way (I was think­ing more about even­ly dis­trib­ut­ing the reds and greens), but so be it!

That’s about all I can think of to say for this image, except: I’d like to wish all my site vis­i­tors a Mer­ry Christ­mas and a Hap­py New Year!

Oh, Venus…!

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I dis­cov­ered just before the start of this month that there’s some­thing of a social media thing going on at the moment with Big Bang Comics char­ac­ters. #Big­Bang­To­ber appar­ent­ly. As an ear­ly con­trib­u­tor to Big Bang (ear­ly and often, in a vari­ety of ways), I felt like maybe I should con­tribute to the cause. So over on LinkedIn, I’ve been post­ing a num­ber of my old Big Bang pieces.

The attached is one I always want­ed to col­or, but nev­er had the chance to, until now. It’s a faux Gold­en Age cov­er, done as one of many for one of the “Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics” issues. Mod­eled after The Ster­anko His­to­ry of Comics books, Gary Carl­son need­ed a lot of cov­ers to fill out the pages. This was one I came up with. Pen­cils, let­ter­ing (and of course, col­or­ing) are mine. Inks were by Jeff Mey­er, who did a great job of help­ing fur­ther the H.G. Peter art look I was going for here. (I came up with the name “P.G.Harris” as kind of Big Bang’s H.G. Peter equivalent).

Thanks for looking!

Monkey Business

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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!

Captain Saturn Giant!

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Some of you may rec­og­nize this as the cov­er of Odd Comics’ Cap­tain Sat­urn Giant, pub­lished in the ear­ly ’60s. Odd Comics as a pub­lish­er seems to have been large­ly for­got­ten these days, and it takes a lot of dig­ging to find their comics, but it’s worth the effort.

Okay, I con­fess: the above was a lie! It’s just a fake com­ic cov­er, by me. I’ll tell you the truth as to how this came about.

Over on LinkedIn, the very tal­ent­ed Thomas N. Perkins IV post­ed a draw­ing he’d done on the first page of a copy of his book If…. Thomas does a lot of cool stuff, but some­thing about this draw­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly caught my eye. It had a sort of Sil­ver Age-look­ing super­hero char­ac­ter, with a big mon­ster behind him. I com­ment­ed on how I liked it, and in Thomas’ reply, he said it was “Cap­tain Sat­urn and his pet Gulglammakus.”

Some­how, their being named plant­ed a seed in my brain. And sud­den­ly, I was envi­sion­ing Cap­tain Sat­urn fea­tured in a Sil­ver Age extra-length Giant com­ic. I told Thomas about this, and with his bless­ing, I went to work on this cover.

Thomas’ orig­i­nal draw­ing was in black and white with gray tones, and he want­ed to fig­ure out the col­or scheme for Cap­tain Sat­urn for me first, which I then trans­lat­ed into the Sil­ver Age comics col­or palette.

His response when I gave him a pre­view of the fin­ished cov­er was, “I won’t lie, I am sure this is a book I would’ve read as a kid.” I’m very pleased to get that kind of reac­tion. And I’ll con­fess, this is the sort of thing that would’ve caught my eye too. And prob­a­bly still would!

For a time after grad­u­at­ing col­lege, I used to have this recur­ring dream: I’d walk into a comics shop I’d nev­er been in, and dis­cov­er all these real­ly cool comics that I’d nev­er seen before! The sad part though is that I could nev­er remem­ber any­thing about them after I woke up, or maybe I’d have tried to cre­ate those comics myself. Maybe one of them might have been some­thing like Cap­tain Saturn!

Cap­tain Sat­urn is ™ & © Thomas N. Perkins IV. Thomas, thanks much for let­ting me play with your toys for a minute!

The Boop! of Frankenstein

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Long time vis­i­tors to this site may recall that come Hal­loween, I have some­thing of a loose tra­di­tion of doing a Franken­stein draw­ing to celebrate.

This year, I was kind of wrack­ing my brain for inspi­ra­tion, look­ing at var­i­ous old comics cov­ers, movie stills and things, and none of the ideas I was com­ing up with were real­ly grab­bing me. Then I stum­bled across a two hour block of Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons air­ing on TCM, done by way of cel­e­brat­ing the stu­dio’s 100th anniver­sary. Watch­ing one of the Bet­ty Boop car­toons, an idea final­ly struck me that I had to do. It grew from there. This is the result.

Orig­i­nal­ly, I was just going to do the black and white image, but while work­ing on it, the thought struck me that this could also work as a com­ic book cov­er. Some of you may be won­der­ing: why make this a Gold Key cov­er par­tic­u­lar­ly? Because back in the Sil­ver Age, if you want­ed to read a com­ic fea­tur­ing a car­toon char­ac­ter, you were going to end up buy­ing a Gold Key com­ic. They had the licens­es to pret­ty much all of the char­ac­ters. Though (so far as I’ve been able to deter­mine) they nev­er actu­al­ly did a Bet­ty Boop com­ic, if any­one had pub­lished one back then, Gold Key would’ve been the publisher.

I’ve always had a gen­er­al soft spot for the “ball and rub­ber hose” school of ani­ma­tion. And more specif­i­cal­ly, I’ve always got­ten a kick out of the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, because they have their own per­son­al­i­ty that’s noth­ing like Dis­ney’s, Warn­er Bros., or any­one else’s. The Fleis­ch­er car­toons are chaot­ic in a fun way, where almost any­thing can hap­pen. Inan­i­mate objects come to life at a momen­t’s notice.

If you don’t know about the Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios car­toons, you real­ly should do some­thing to rec­ti­fy that. You can prob­a­bly find a num­ber of them on YouTube. They’re a real treat (no trick!).

“Dad joke” free of charge. Hap­py Halloween!

I Dare You!

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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!

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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.

“What Have I Done??”

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So back when I first start­ed this site, I had in mind cre­at­ing a tra­di­tion of doing Franken­stein-relat­ed art for Hal­loween, when I had time. It’s been awhile since I did one. So here you go!

Mil­ton the Mon­ster is one of those car­toons from my child­hood that I’ve always looked back on fond­ly. Cer­tain car­toon prop­er­ties are well-remem­bered and seem to come back for revivals every so often. Mil­ton is one of those car­toons that seems to have slid into obscu­ri­ty, unfor­tu­nate­ly. Most car­toon fans either don’t remem­ber it, or have nev­er heard of it.

For those who don’t know about the show, the con­cep­t’s right there in the show’s theme song! Take a look. I had­n’t watched the show in a long time, so doing this cov­er was an excuse to watch some episodes and refresh my mem­o­ry. Yes, it’s def­i­nite­ly lim­it­ed TV ani­ma­tion, and the jokes can get a lit­tle corn­ball, but I still get a kick out of it. If some­one were to actu­al­ly do a revival of this show, it would be a blast to be involved!

Search­ing for actu­al char­ac­ter mod­els to draw from, I could­n’t find any. I have a sense that TV ani­ma­tion in the ’60s some­times had a much broad­er inter­pre­ta­tion of “on-mod­el” than what it does now, or even when I start­ed work­ing in ani­ma­tion in the ear­ly ’90s. It’s sur­pris­ing to see how much the look of the char­ac­ters on this show can fluc­tu­ate from episode to episode, depend­ing on the animator.

And of course, this had to be a Gold Key cov­er. They actu­al­ly did pub­lish one issue of a Mil­ton the Mon­ster com­ic back in the mid-’60s. If you were a kid in the ’60s and want­ed to buy a com­ic book fea­tur­ing your favorite ani­mat­ed character(s), Gold Key had the rights pret­ty much sewn up to all of them!

Any­way, I hope you enjoy this. And Hap­py Halloween!

The Captain That Split the Scene

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Captain Marvel Split! by Mark LewisIt won’t come as any sur­prise to long­time vis­i­tors of my site to hear this, but most of my friends know that when you say the words “Cap­tain Mar­vel” to me, my default set­ting is to think of the orig­i­nal Faw­cett char­ac­ter. How­ev­er, this ain’t him!

This Cap­tain Mar­vel is an android. His com­ic debuted in 1966, pub­lished by M.F. Enter­pris­es, 13 years after Faw­cett pub­lished their last adven­ture of the orig­i­nal Cap­tain Marvel.

So what does this Cap­tain Mar­vel do? He seems to have a lot of the usu­al super­hero pow­ers: strength, flight, etc. But his real call­ing card is that when he says his mag­ic word (“Split!”), he can detach parts of his body at will and have them fly around and do his bid­ding. A unique pow­er, to be sure, but more than a lit­tle odd. To rejoin, he speaks his oth­er mag­ic word, “Xam!”

In look­ing for a fresh take on this Cap­tain, I thought it was such an odd­ball con­cept that it might have been bet­ter-suit­ed to Sat­ur­day Morn­ing car­toons. So I start­ed to re-imag­ine it as the kind of semi-comedic super­hero adven­ture car­toon that back then would’ve fit in well along­side Han­na-Bar­bera shows like Franken­stein Jr., The Impos­si­bles, or Atom Ant. Since those shows appeared as Gold Key comics, that seemed a good place for my re-imag­ined Cap­tain Mar­vel too.