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.