How Much Do You Need?: A Dive Bar in a Western Town!

Here are the rough layouts to page 5 of War of the Independents #4. After grabbing a bite on the village green, our heroes' search for the helmet of Cerebus inevitably and inexorably leads to a dank biker bar, where they encounter Grampa Grizzly (whose resemblance to Chris Ecker is completely coincidental) and what look to be denizens from "In Pictopia" (my stock mutant-robotic extras, in other words). Photographed here are marker refinements on canary yellow tracing paper over blue and graphite pencil roughs.

Mr. Spook, Protoplasman, The Toxic Avenger, Felix the Cat, Usagi Yojimbo, Zippy the Pinhead, and Milk and Cheese do some munching and littering.

Cerebus spots a likely dive bar as Pokey and Felix brave forth.

Too Much Coffee Man and Flaming Carrot catch up to Bone, The Tick and company, and are greeted by Blockheads J & G with a scowling Grampa Grizzly in the center.

Rough layouts of pages 4 and 5. I'm actually working more than twice up from publication size to accommodate the huge cast of characters -- and for the convenience of my aging eyes and hand!

See previous posts on this blog for more War of the Independents #4 art in progress!
Characters are ™ and  © their respective creators/owners.

What's for Lunch? A Gravy Train with Biscuit Wheels!

Here are the roughs for page 4 of War of the Independents #4 (forthcoming from Red Anvil Comics), with some of the most exciting food truck art you've ever seen! (I can see fans starting sketchbooks just to collect their favorite artists' renditions of food truck beauty shots!) See previous posts on this blog for other examples of the art in progress.

Art Clokey's Gumby and Pokey circle behind a food truck run by the Blockheads (J & G), while Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot, Otto Messmer's Felix the Cat, Jeff Smith's Bone, Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, Larry Marder's Mr. Spook (from Tales of the Beanworld), Lloyd Kaufman and Joe Ritter's The Toxic Avenger, Bill Griffith's Zippy the Pinhead, Ben Edlund's The Tick, Evan Dorkin's Milk and Cheese, and Gary Carlson and Mort Todd's Protoplasman break for lunch four pages into this non-stop action issue! What they consume could alter the destiny of the WOTI universe for at least several pages to come! (The fire plug appears by special arrangement with the estate of Ernie Bushmiller.)

Flaming Carrot has a moment with Shannon Wheeler's Too Much Coffee Man. (Kaffé Hut® is a registered trademark of Kiosk Proliferation International, all rights reserved.)

"I am already getting inquiries from collectors of food truck art," says issue illustrator Don Simpson. "Resquests for depictions of various characters stopping at food trucks have been pouring in non-stop." The most interesting request has been for a re-creation of the famous Action Comics #1cover with an SLE Equipment concession trailer replacing the 1937 Desoto touring sedan that Superman hoists above his head.

Stay tuned for more art after the artist returns from lunch!

The Comic Warrior: A Lost Don Simpson Story from 1986!

Update: John R. Annunziata provided me with sharper scans to replace the previous snapshots. They are posted below.

Below is a story I created for St. Paul, Minnesota retailer John Annunziata, proprietor of The Comic Warrior shop, in 1986 . I had been to John's show in St. Paul with guests Timothy Truman and others, and had drawn John into Megaton Man #6 as the shady dealer who brings the Captain Megaton Man costume to villainess Rose Shark. John was delighted by this caricatural portrayal and subsequently commissioned me to create a full-color drawing in 1985 (below) of his Comic Warrior store mascot (essentially himself decked out as a barbarian), in which I included not only Megaton Man but also the obligatory supine female (a la Frazetta), which I rendered completely nude. John was delighted by this drawing as well, but in order to display the drawing publicly (he brought it to shows like the Chicago Comic-Con) he painted a fur bikini on the glass of the frame to keep younger eyes from being corrupted (both versions are shown here).

When I moved from Wisconsin to Los Angeles (specifically Van Nuys, in the San Fernando Valley north of L.A.) for a few months at the end of 1986, John contracted me to draw an 11-page Comic Warrior story from his script. I did not even make photocopies of the artwork, which I sent directly to him in Minnesota. Outside of a specially-printed booklet he issued to promote the shop, the story has not been widely seen. At the time I drew the story, I had just completed my ten-issue run on Megaton Man and was beginning Border Worlds. The art is a kind of tame confluence of overtly underground influences (R. Crumb's Zap Comix and Dave Sheridan's Tales of the Leather Nun, a page of original art from which I owned for a long time) and the prevalent Robert E. Howard sword-and-sorcery trappings of the time. In other words, the story evokes not so much 1986 but rather a decade or fifteen years earlier! For nearly 30 years I remembered drawing the story but only vaguely, and it is quite a shock to see it again after so long. It is a delight to relive this rarity and wonderful to think of the person I used to be that is revealed (and concealed!) in this work.

Sadly, John passed away in 2005, and just today his son John R. Annunziata contacted me for the first time, enquiring about the story and passing along these scans of the booklet that the store printed up in the late 80s. My sincere thanks to John R. for permitting me to post them here.

--October 12, 2014; revised texts and better scans posted October 13, 2014.

Below is the original convention sketch I drew in 1985. Caution: cartoon nudity! John brought this piece to shows, but since it was for public display, had a bikini painted over the offending regions of the female figure so as not to corrupt younger (or older!) viewers.