Tag: Savage Dragon

Getting the Lay of Things

It’s occurred to me that recent­ly I’ve kind of trapped myself into almost every­thing I post need­ing to be a big pro­duc­tion: a ful­ly-real­ized cov­er, with inks, let­ter­ing and col­or­ing. I’m giv­ing myself license to not always have to do that, hence this post of work from the past.

Reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to this site will know that I’ve had a long­time asso­ci­a­tion with Big Bang Comics, going back to when it first was pub­lished through Cal­iber. And I’ve kept that con­nec­tion even to today. Over the length of my asso­ci­a­tion, I’ve had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tribute in var­i­ous ways. I’ve pen­ciled sto­ries and cov­ers, done ink­ing, col­or­ing, designed char­ac­ters and logos, and even con­tributed ideas to sto­ries here and there.

But you would­n’t know that I also got to do rough lay­outs for oth­er artists to work with! What you see here are lay­outs done for a sequence in Big Bang Comics #14, which was part two of some­thing we referred to as the “Time­bomber” sto­ry­line. Erik Larsen saw fit to loan Gary Carl­son his Sav­age Drag­on for this sto­ry, where Drag­on end­ed up with a lit­er­al time­bomb strapped to his chest that kept explod­ing and bounc­ing him around through dif­fer­ent time peri­ods (and art and writ­ing styles). Along the way, Drag­on met up with var­i­ous Big Bang heroes and villains.

For the final sequence of Big Bang #14, it was sup­posed to have a “Bronze Age Jack Kir­by at DC” kind of feel to it. As I recall, when this job came up, I was too busy at the time with my day job in ani­ma­tion to actu­al­ly pen­cil it myself, but I did agree to do lay­outs (seen here) for anoth­er artist. If you have a copy of the com­ic, you’ll see that my lay­outs were giv­en to pen­cil­er Joe Zier­man, who did a pret­ty good job of tak­ing the “Kir­by-ness” of my lay­outs and fol­low­ing through with it in his pencils.

Oh, by the way: I also did Ster­anko-style lay­outs for the sequence pre­ced­ing this Kir­by one, AND a cov­er rough/thumbnail lay­out for this issue that was giv­en to Rich Buck­ler (which I even did a col­or guide for). So I was kind of all over this issue, but in sort of an “invis­i­ble” way.

Though I love see­ing oth­er peo­ple’s roughs, I always feel a lit­tle fun­ny about post­ing my own. So hope­ful­ly vis­i­tors enjoy this.

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!