Tag Archives: retro

It’s the Fourth of July!

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It’s Inde­pen­dence Day today in the U.S. of A.! That usu­al­ly means time off, doing fun things like pic­nics or bar­be­cues with friends, pos­si­bly tak­ing in a fire­works show (depend­ing on where you live), and maybe hope­ful­ly even giv­ing a thought to some of the free­doms we’re priv­i­leged to enjoy in this coun­try, which we can some­times take for granted.

This post is most­ly moti­vat­ed by the fact that real­iz­ing the hol­i­day was com­ing up, I had an image pop into my mind appro­pri­ate for the day, so I thought I’d go for it! As not­ed there, the char­ac­ter is Miss Fire­crack­er from Big Bang Comics, though she’s depict­ed here in a dif­fer­ent style from how she ever appeared in Big Bang.

This is a good oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk about Big Bang Comics a lit­tle bit. Some peo­ple read­ing this may know that I was a con­trib­u­tor to Big Bang through its most active years. Though I can’t claim to have been there from the absolute very begin­ning, I did get in pret­ty ear­ly on. The char­ac­ter I had the most involve­ment in shap­ing would’ve been the Badge. But thanks to Big Bang hon­chos Gary Carl­son and Chris Eck­er, I got the chance to get my hands into a whole lot more than that.

Not only did I get to draw a num­ber of oth­er Big Bang char­ac­ters (par­tic­u­lar­ly on fake com­ic cov­ers as seen in “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics” issues of Big Bang Comics), I got to design sev­er­al oth­er char­ac­ters, cre­ate logos, even kib­itz on some sto­ry­lines, ink and col­or. The way I looked at Big Bang, it was sort of  “comics his­to­ry through a fun­house mir­ror.” You got to cre­ate things that felt famil­iar, yet new at the same time. It was a real­ly fun ride, guys! Thanks much!

I’ve got anoth­er post already in the pipeline that I hope to be able to pull the trig­ger on soon, but that’s it for this one. Have a great 4th, everyone!

Doc (“Don’t Call Me ‘Doctor!‘”) Strange

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Now that it’s fin­ished, I can show you one of the two items I teased back in Decem­ber. It’s a pin-up of the old Nedor Comics hero Doc Strange, as he might have appeared on the cov­er of an issue of Thrilling Comics in 1965, had Nedor still been pub­lish­ing at that point.

If you’re not famil­iar with the com­pa­ny, Nedor pub­lished (under sev­er­al names) dur­ing the gold­en age. They actu­al­ly had a fair­ly siz­able group of heroes, includ­ing Doc Strange. Nedor ceased pub­lish­ing comics at the end of the gold­en age. Since then, many peo­ple have tak­en a shot at doing some­thing with their old char­ac­ters. AC Comics has made use of them over the years, and so did Alan Moore and Peter Hogan more recent­ly in the Tom Strong spin­off minis­eries, Ter­ra Obscura.

Doc was a scientist/adventurer who invent­ed a serum he named Alo­sun, dis­tilled from “sun atoms.” This serum gave him super­hu­man strength, flight and invul­ner­a­bil­i­ty when he used it.

Enough of the his­to­ry les­son. So why did I do this pin-up/­cov­er? Easy; because I was asked. The one and only Will Meugniot is cur­rent­ly doing a new cre­ator-owned series (in the back of AC Comics’ Fem­Force) that picks up the threads of the Nedor books with the descen­dants of some of the char­ac­ters. It’s called “Agents of N.E.D.O.R.,” and is intend­ed as a peri­od piece tak­ing place in 1965. Will invit­ed sev­er­al artists to con­tribute pin-ups of the orig­i­nal Nedor char­ac­ters, and I was very flat­tered to be asked if I’d like to do so too.

As is typ­i­cal for me, instead of mak­ing things sim­ple on myself, I had to make a whole cov­er out of it. Since Will’s sto­ry takes place in 1965, I thought this should be a cov­er for Thrilling Comics (which starred Doc) also from ’65, as if Nedor had kept on pub­lish­ing all that time. I even did some math to work out the issue num­ber. How’s that for obsessive?

Doc Strange most often went on his adven­tures accom­pa­nied by his young side­kick Mike (who wore an iden­ti­cal out­fit, only with the addi­tion of a green cape for some rea­son). I thought it would be more fun though to show Doc with his girl­friend, Vir­ginia Thomp­son, as she would also some­times take part in his adven­tures. Of course, I updat­ed her look here for the times.

This will appear in b/w line art form in Fem­Force #159, since the book has b/w inte­ri­ors. But for my blog here, I want­ed to go full col­or. Because it’s how I saw this in my head from the start. I get asked to do a b/w pin-up and I envi­sion some­thing in col­or; go figure!

Thanks, Will. This was a lot of fun!

The 50th

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This is not exact­ly some­thing brand new, but done a few years back for the invites to my Mom and Dad’s 50th Anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion. I thought maybe a few more peo­ple than just those who saw it back then might enjoy it.

I don’t nor­mal­ly do a lot of car­i­ca­ture. So I fig­ured as long as I was going to attempt it, I might take my cues from one of the best: Al Hirschfeld. It was def­i­nite­ly a chal­lenge to work this way, but I was hap­py with the result. Oh; don’t strain your eyes look­ing for “Ninas,” because there aren’t any!

Not much more to say about this right now, except; Mom, Dad, I love you very much.

She’s a Sensation!

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Though DC’s big reboot has already been sprung on us, I had one more image in that poster style that I had to try. Might as well com­plete the tri­fec­ta, right?

So this time out, it’s Won­der Woman. If you’ve read my pre­vi­ous posts on these gold­en age char­ac­ters, I real­ized I kind of uncon­scious­ly set up a pro­gres­sion; I men­tioned that I liked Super­man, but lat­er con­fessed I liked Bat­man a lit­tle more. So you might be expect­ing me this time out to say I liked Won­der Woman the best. But you’d be wrong.

Sor­ry to say, I real­ly was­n’t all that into Won­der Woman as a kid. I appre­ci­ate the strip much more now as an adult than I did back then, for its his­toric sig­nif­i­cance as well as some of the aspects that are unique to it (the fan­ta­sy ele­ments, the mytho­log­i­cal, etc.). Per­haps the gold­en age art (by H.G. Peter) looked a lit­tle heavy-hand­ed and crude to me in some ways as a kid. Look­ing at it now, I have more of an appre­ci­a­tion for it (It feels at times like a sort of car­toon ver­sion of an Albrecht Dür­er engraving).

Won­der Woman is an inter­est­ing con­cept that seems to be a tough one for writ­ers and artists to get a han­dle on. And even if they man­age, it seems hard to get a han­dle on it such that it will engage peo­ple and get them to buy the book (Which is prob­a­bly the more impor­tant point). Many approach­es have been tried with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and some don’t get tried at all. But Marston and Peter must’ve had a han­dle on some­thing when they cre­at­ed her. She’s sur­vived this long and man­aged to become part of our col­lec­tive pop cul­ture men­tal land­scape, rec­og­niz­able even to non-comics read­ers. I think that’s worth a lit­tle salute here.

A con­fes­sion: this poster is a loose homage (which I acknowl­edged in how I signed it) to an orig­i­nal poster by Lud­wig Hohlwein. In study­ing his work online, I stum­bled across one poster that just seemed a nat­ur­al to adapt for a Won­der Woman image. It all but cried out for it. So that is what I did!

“I Shall Become a BAT!”

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The clock is count­ing down to DC Comics’ big reboot, and it’s still got me think­ing back on the orig­i­nals. I thought I should get at least one more post in here, before it hap­pens. Super­man was look­ing a lit­tle lonely.

Like I said in my pre­vi­ous post, I’ve always had an attrac­tion to the ear­ly gold­en age ver­sions of some of these char­ac­ters, despite the occa­sion­al rugged­ness in exe­cu­tion. There was a pri­mal kind of ener­gy there that per­haps got lost a lit­tle bit along the way, as the artists and writ­ers got bet­ter at their craft, and began to for­mu­late the rules for how you were sup­posed to do this sort of thing.

Last time, I copped to hav­ing an affec­tion for the gold­en age Super­man. But if pushed, I’d have to admit that I prob­a­bly liked the gold­en age Bat­man just a lit­tle bit more. Those ear­ly strips just dripped with mood: dark shad­ows, misty nights with almost always an enor­mous full moon, and plen­ty of strange char­ac­ters for the Bat­man to go up against. When I first began to encounter this stuff in those DC 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars as a kid, I had no prob­lem at all under­stand­ing why kids encoun­ter­ing these sto­ries for the first time on news­stands back in the gold­en age were attract­ed to it. This stuff cap­tured your imagination.

In the same vein as the Super­man poster, here’s one fea­tur­ing Bat­man in that ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Poster Style. This time out, I did my ver­sion of a clas­sic pose that Kane used a num­ber of times in those ear­ly issues. A very big “Thank You” to Bill Fin­ger, Bob Kane, Jer­ry Robin­son, George Rous­sos, and all the rest of Kane’s “ghosts” over the years who made Bat­man what he was!

“Look! Up in the Sky!”

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If you fol­low comics news at all, you’ve prob­a­bly heard there’s this big reboot that DC Comics is doing in Sep­tem­ber. They’re start­ing all their books over from #1, redesign­ing all the char­ac­ters and redo­ing their ori­gins. You can’t assume now that you know any­thing for sure about who they are, their moti­va­tions or the over­all scenario.

I’m not going to get into com­men­tary on that here (there’s been plen­ty of that already in oth­er places online). But I’ll admit the idea of the retire­ment of the orig­i­nal char­ac­ters has me think­ing back on them a bit wist­ful­ly. Though tech­ni­cal­ly a child of comics’ sil­ver and bronze ages, I’ve always had a fas­ci­na­tion with the gold­en age era too. Despite the fact that work was often a bit crude in com­par­i­son to what came lat­er, there was a cer­tain life and raw ener­gy to those ear­ly incar­na­tions of the characters.

It’s a lot eas­i­er to lay hands on gold­en age comics sto­ries now. Back when I was a kid, most­ly you just got to read about them (in books like Ster­anko’s His­to­ry of Comics, or All in Col­or for a Dime). If you could lay hands on one of DC’s 100-Page Super-Spec­tac­u­lars though, you knew you were in for a rare treat.

Like I say, I’ve long had a soft spot for these ear­ly, pri­mal ver­sions of char­ac­ters like Super­man (the proof is at left; a scan of a fake gold­en age cov­er I did when I was about 12 or 13). And with the DC reboot com­ing, I thought I’d revis­it the orig­i­nal Super­man once again. The new image up top could’ve gone in sev­er­al dif­fer­ent direc­tions, but what I wound up hon­ing in on is a Shus­ter-esque ver­sion, posed more for­mal­ly. It’s been tak­en in the direc­tion of vin­tage poster art from an even ear­li­er era. Because that seemed like a fun idea at the time.

Just my salute to the gold­en age in gen­er­al, and the orig­i­nal Super­man in par­tic­u­lar. Thanks very much, Mr. Siegel and Mr. Shuster!

UPDATE: I recent­ly dis­cov­ered online these neat Super­man pages, drawn by Stew­art Immo­nen some years back. Done in the style of Win­sor McCay’s “Lit­tle Nemo,” they’re not entire­ly unre­lat­ed to what I’m try­ing to do here with this poster. I thought these were real­ly neat, and worth shar­ing. It’s fun­ny how well Super­man works in a style like this!

Rasputin

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Cour­tesy of Turn­er Clas­sic Movies and my DVR (what a great inven­tion!), I had the chance not long ago to check out a cou­ple of old movies I’d nev­er seen before, both deal­ing with the infa­mous Rasputin. TCM played both films back to back when they aired. First on the agen­da was Rasputin and the Empress from 1932, with Lionel Bar­ry­more play­ing Rasputin (and doing a good and creepy job of it, too!). They fol­lowed that up with Christo­pher Lee play­ing the role in the 1966 Ham­mer Stu­dios film Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Lee, as usu­al, did a great job. He’s always a lot of fun to watch.

I don’t pre­tend to be any kind of an expert on the his­tor­i­cal Rasputin, so I can’t com­ment on the accu­ra­cy of either of these films. But they were fas­ci­nat­ing to watch. And obvi­ous­ly I’m not the only one who finds the char­ac­ter intrigu­ing; look­ing on IMDB, the first time some­one played Rasputin on film was back in 1917, only one year after his death. And he keeps crop­ping up as a char­ac­ter in films, to this day!

With­out try­ing for a like­ness of either Bar­ry­more or Lee (or the real Rasputin), I thought it might be fun to take a shot at a char­ac­ter draw­ing. I only meant to do one draw­ing, but then I was­n’t entire­ly sure about how it was com­ing out, so I kept going, envi­sion­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es. There’s a whole bunch of exper­i­men­ta­tion going on here, with styles, tools, col­or­ing etc. Instead of mak­ing myself crazy try­ing to decide which way to go, I thought I’d just go ahead and run them all up the flag­pole, let the chips fall where they may. And that’s prob­a­bly more than enough Rasputin for any­body in one dose!

I was a one-man meme!

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!

Happy Thanksgiving: Now Go Out and Hunt Down Your Own Turkey!

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I still haven’t had time to get back to fig­ur­ing out how to install the gallery plu­g­in (due to anoth­er project which will prob­a­bly make its way on here even­tu­al­ly), but I want­ed to keep the site active. So by request of my friend Lyle, I’ve post­ed the draw­ing on the left. It’s a fake com­ic cov­er fea­tur­ing a jun­gle girl char­ac­ter named Zhantika.

She’s the blonde at left. Zhan­ti­ka was a char­ac­ter cre­at­ed by Lyle and myself. Around that time, I’d got­ten my hands on the Ger­ber Pho­to-Jour­nal Guide to Com­ic Books. Look­ing through them, we both real­ized sep­a­rate­ly that the “jun­gle girl” com­ic was a real pop­u­lar genre of its own at one point that sort of van­ished. That sparked an idea. Lyle came up with the basic con­cept, and the visu­al was mine.

We actu­al­ly pub­lished a Zhan­ti­ka sto­ry in Big Bang #17, much thanks to Gary Carl­son. I also have to thank inker David Zim­mer­mann, who brought a real­ly nice pol­ish to my pen­cils with his brush­work. The above image is not from that sto­ry though; it was done as a faux gold­en age cov­er for one of “The Big Bang His­to­ry of Comics” issues (#27, if any­one cares to look). It was part of a whole fic­ti­tious his­to­ry of comics that did­n’t real­ly exist, but it was lots of fun to pretend.

Maybe even­tu­al­ly one day I’ll col­or this cov­er, just for fun. And just to make this a lit­tle longer: Zhan­ti­ka is ™ and © Lyle Dodd and Mark Lewis.