Graphics for a Ghetto Tale!

Around 2015, I was asked to illustrate a non-fiction story based on the Holocaust for a non-profit org here in Pittsburgh (the true story was made into a movie not very long ago). Written by a Xeric Award-winner, I attempted an early Jack Kirby style, which seemed suited to the strip, along with a certain Old Testament look to some of the women. The computer lettering was applied later, so here is a look at the art without text. Enjoy!

All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures are ™ and © Don Simpson 2021, all rights reserved.

Cool Beans: An Aborted Comic Strip from dot.com Era!

Some time in the early 2000s, my entrepreneurial partner asked me to create cartoon characters for her educational website, S'Coolbeans. Little more than link list, the site aspired to be a clearing house of educational resources for teachers and educators. The characters were used in fridge magnets and promotion, and the logo I designed became a keychain. The site didn't take off, but the sample comic strips I developed independently, I thought, had some potential. My partner, however, spitefully demanded I kill it off. (Not long after this, we were divorced.)

Selling a comic strip to newspapers is billion-to-one prospect at best, and I've never seen myself as having the sensibility for such a grueling production schedule. Still, I am fond of these strips and thought it could have gone further. Oh, well. Enjoy!

All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures are ™ and © Don Simpson 2021, all rights reserved.

Lost Marvel Sample Pages from 1983-84!

Below are some sample pages I began but never finished that were intended to get me work at Marvel circa 1983-84. Ostensibly a Fantastic Four story (with Doctor Doom and Daredevil), it was no doubt an update of FF #73, a battered copy of which I had in those days. It was one of the few mainstream superhero comics I had lying around, having sold my collection of well-read comics I'd accumulated as a reader in the 1970s; by the 1980s, I was into undergrounds, French Les Humanoides Associes or Heavy Metal science fiction, and classic reprints of EC, American newspaper strips, and so on. (That copy of FF #73, by the way, sacrificed its price and issue box as well as the Comics Code seal for a mock Megatropolis Quartet cover in Megaton Man #1.)

Judging from the page numbering, the story was originally to run to six or more pages; no other notes, thumbnails, roughs or anything else exist but these three pages (2, 4, and 6), and since these are unfinished, it leads me to believe I never even started the others. The penciling looks so tight in spots as to appear traced (a good example is the Daredevil figure in page 4, panel 4); if so, I would have been working from some kind of rough layouts (now lost). Maybe pages 1, 2, and 3 were sold long ago to collectors; I honestly can't recall at this point.

All three pages are on Strathmore one-ply Bristol, also evidence that I was tracing roughs, but where I would have had access to a light table in those days is a mystery, since I didn't own one. (Perhaps former roommate Mike Kazaleh permitted me to use his animation table? He was still living in the neighborhood within walking distance from my Detroit apartment on West Forest.)

What is evident from looking at the art is that I was using white Zip-a-Tone (like over the space ship in page 2, panel 1 and the Sue Storm figure in page 2, panel 3), a regular Zip with scratched highlights on Doc Doom (page 2, panel 4). These techniques were employed on the early issues of Megaton Man (see #1-4), and I might have assayed these samples after completing Megaton Man #1 and awaiting to hear back from publishers in the spring of 1984.

Also of note is the use of white-out and the panel borders on page 4, the corners of which await cleaning up. (British artists, I understood at the time, ran their borderlines past the corners and whited out; I didn't often do that after I turned pro.)

Why I didn't complete them is unclear. The most probable reason is that Megaton Man #1 found a publisher, and ongoing issues kept me busy. But I was conflicted about work-for-hire for the big publishers anyway. Whether my interpretation of the characters or my style would have sold to any of the Marvel editors is anyone's guess; whether I would have been satisfied as a mainstream freelancer is also an open question. While I set these aside unfinished, I did attempt other samples years later (mostly for Marvel), many of which I have published elsewhere on this blog.

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Characters that are not my property are ™ and © the respective owners. All other character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2021, all rights reserved.

Penciling Justice Machine #12

I don't recall how I came to pencil the interiors of Justice Machine #12 (Comico, December 1987), but I do recall disappointed at how it turned out. The lettering wasn't what I had envisioned, and the inking was somewhat rushed. Of course, I had never drawn a comic book that I hadn't scripted, lettered, and inked myself, and had control over the color. But even so, I had much higher hopes for this, one of my first "mainstream" superhero penciling jobs.

Ten years earlier, Mike Gustovich, the book's creator and inker over my pencils, had been one of the first pros I had ever met (at one of Stu Shapiro/Todd Loren's Fantasticons at Sans Souci Hall in Farmington, Michigan). He always had trouble drawing women, but Mike was awesomely talented when he took his time. He had a great Wrightsonish superhero style on his Cobalt Blue work for Michigan's Power Comics. Unfortunately, ten years later, he had devolved into a total deadline-driven hack.

When I was tapped for the job of penciling this issue of Justice Machine, I recall hoping that in some small way I would be helping Mike out insofar as he'd be able to take his time on the inking and the final result would justify the series' (and his career's) early promise.

I was also hoping, as an example of what I could do with "straight" superhero work, that this freelance assignment would lead to more mainstream jobs along those lines.

No such luck. The final result appears as if Mike inked eight pages a day with a trowel to get the title back on schedule, pure and simple. I always considered that a profound shame. This was before the days of convenient photocopies or scanning, so I don't have any documentary record of my original pencils (perhaps scripter Bob Ingersoll does?), but I know they were tight and polished, and a lot better than this sloppy hatchet job is able to convey.

The little girl looks awful, and I take full blame for that. But there are a lot of other qualities I brought to the job that were completely and forever lost, such as the graceful female figures, which are almost pathologically botched in the inking. You can still see some of the body language and layout sensibility I brought to the job, but almost nothing of the finesse I brought to the shading, and it's beyond anyone's ability to imagine how good this job might have turned out. Alas.

It would be fun to pencil these pages again and re-ink them, but every freelancer has a job that got messed up by some hack inker. Only, very seldom does that inker turn out to be the book's own once-talented creator.  It was a discouraging experience.

Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series! New YA prose chapter every Friday!

"Chances Are the Chances Are": Munden's Bar from Grimjack #63

These are some low-res scans of pages and the preliminary rough sketches (done at full size, which I traced on a light table onto the Bristol board) for a story I did in Grimjack #63 (First Comics, October 1989). This was after working with John Ostrander and Del Close on Wasteland for DC Comics, so maybe it was felt I was ready for a Munden's Bar back-up feature.

I don't have a very clear recollection of the sequence of events, but early in my career (1985) I moved to central Wisconsin and stayed at Kitchen Sink Press, publisher of Megaton Man for a year. This meant that I was close(r) to Chicago, and frequently attended Chicago Mini-Cons and the big annual show. I recall visiting John Ostrander's home with Bill Loebs on one occasion, I think before I was hired to be on of four artists on the Wasteland anthology. I also met editor Mike Gold, who I think edited both Grimjack and Wasteland at one time or another. But again, I'm not too clear on how this happened to unfold.

 

One noteworthy thing about this story is that I chose to draw it using markers--probably Pilot pens or the equivalent--a technique Gil Kane was known for. This was a departure from my usual pen/brush and India ink approach, which is more archival. As expected, the markers have faded and discolored over the years, and I haven't used markers on Bristol board since (although I have inked roughs using tracing paper with Pilots, et al, to good effect). I still prefer the classic India ink approach, although a number of things (like patches made with Avery labels, and dot screens) have not aged well.

Cartooning is an ephemeral art, and a commercial art; it will be up to the archivists and preservationists to sort all out. I did like the freedom pens offered; it was a freer drawing process, not having to dip a brush or quill every couple minutes, or wait for the India ink to dry.

I don't have complete scans of the originals or roughs, and all of these images are culled from the internet (I sold the art years ago and no longer even have a copy of Grimjack #63), so the quality here is not the best. But I still have fans bringing these up to me at shows to autograph, which I'm only too happy to do. It was one of my more thorough freelance jobs--I was learning the craft, only five years into my career!

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Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series - a new prose chapter every Friday!

Female Fate: The Doctor is In!

Here is another pitch I made to DC Comics, probably around 1989. I can't remember if this was at the bidding of editor Mike Gold (who I worked with on Wasteland) or writer Bill Loebs, or someone else, but it was suggested to me that they were looking for an artist for a female Dr. Fate series, and that I should send in some samples.

Dr. Fate leaps into action. Don't ask me who the guy with the mullet is!

I created the two pages below--one a story page and one more or less a pin-up--as a pencil sample. At the time, I almost exclusively inked my own work, and did not pencil tightly--the early Megaton Man comics of five years earlier were loosely penciled--scribbles would have been a fair description--before I inked like a neurotic madman. But by the late eighties, I was consciously trying to simplify; still, I didn't see much point in penciling tightly when I would be inking myself.

The penciling here is stiff and heavy-handed; I usually left feathering details for the inking stage. These were hypothetically intended for someone else to ink.

These Dr. Fate samples show the struggle for me to pencil tightly. They are stiff and somewhat artificial, and lack the grace of later work--were I naturally penciled more thoroughly, even for myself as inker. These days I pencil tightly mainly because I so often have to lay aside a project for long periods of time, and when I come back to it, if I only have scribbles or thumbnail layouts, I have no idea what I was thinking.

Needless to say, these samples did not result in any work, on Dr. Fate, at least, and have languished for thirty years as rejects. I've carted them around to conventions for years, where I've sold lots of rejected sample pages, but these have never appealed to collectors. Still, I thought there was something left to get out of the pages, and yesterday I started inking them.

I have no idea if my helmet design was in any way innovative, but I seem to have been concerned her to show it off. There's a clumsy Golden Age feel to the final result that I find charming, if I do say so myself.

It was fun, particularly given the high quality of DC Comics Bristol board, which beats anything available today. The result is somewhat smudgy and dirty--I'm not used to inking pencils on Bristol as much these days (I prefer Strathmore 400 Drawing), and these pencils were particularly heavy handed and smudgy to begin with. But I got some tinge of Joe Kubert, Frank Thorne, and even Lee Elias, I think, in the final inks, and something of a Golden Age vibe that pleases me, despite the 90s vintage.

I don't think it was any great loss that I was never assigned Dr. Fate, male or female, since I never was as much of a DC fan as I was a Marvel fan. I couldn't tell you anything about the characters depicted or the story--there isn't much of one. It's obvious that I was just putting some panels together in a layout and trying to demonstrate how I would handle the character in movement.

Why let a piece of quality Bristol board go to waste, even if it's from the last century?

I draw a lot differently today, and if I were doing something like this from scratch the result would be a lot more pleasing. But it's not bad for art started three decades ago. I've gotten pleasing results by finishing sketches of Ms. Megaton Man from this same period, but if I go much further back beyond 1989, I can't do it. You can't put new wine in old wine skins, and my drawing from 1984-1988 is too different from my drawing today for inking old pencils to work. I think too differently and approach the whole problem of drawing too differently. Plus, I know a lot more about anatomy and figure drawing than I did in the 1980s. (My "mature" period doesn't kick in until about 1998.)

But hopefully some collector will find my inked Dr. Fates more desirable--and it was a good warm-up for other projects I have on the ol' drawing board.
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Please read my YA prose experiment Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series and tell me what you think!