Penciling CRAZY! (and Some Sketches that Never Flew!)

Below are scans of the original pencils for my contributions to CRAZY!, the one-shot published by Marvel Entertainment in October 2019. "The No-Prizes" was drawn from a plot by Frank Tieri and John Cirelli; the "Galactus Go-Kart" pin-up was written (if you want to call that writing!) by me.

You'll either have to imagine your own funny dialogue (it shouldn't be hard!) or buy the printed comic to see how it all turned out! You'll see inking by Dexter Vines and colors by Federico Blee ("Galactus Go-Kart") and inks by Walden Wong and colors by Dono Sánchez Almira ("The No-Prizes").

A lot of the ideas discussed with editor Mark Paniccia revolved around the Thanos Copter in one form or another. The Galactus Go-Kart was intended as one in a series of "Crazy Villain Vehicles" I had in mind along the lines of the Thanos Copter, but none of 'em got off the ground, so to speak. (I did work the copter into "The No-Prizes," but somehow it came out purple instead of yellow. Go figure!) Here are the sketches:

For more finished art that didn't make the grade, click here!

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Not Branded Yet! Stuff You Won't See in CRAZY!

Followers on my social media know I was lucky enough to get an email from Marvel Entertainment senior editor Mark Paniccia back in May asking if I'd like to contribute to a 40-page one-shot revival of CRAZY! I teach college writing during the fall and spring semesters, and school had just let out, and I was a little rusty at the ol' drawing board, but I said, "Why not?!"

Colorized Spidey. Detail of a page below.

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.

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Dr. Spidey and My Own Mr. Hyde!

This time out, it's another Marvel sample I submitted circa 2002 to see if I could land some mainstream superhero work. Although highly regarded in some circles for my parody, science fiction, and even smutty underground work, I never broke into the mainstream or "straight" superhero ranks, where all the money in comics was to be found. Instead, I remained on the periphery with goofier or offbeat assignments like DC's Wasteland, Marvel's Open Space, or oddball Flash stories. (I did have my chances, early on: Mike Gold wanted me to ink First Comics' Whisper, and Dan Mishkin and Gary Cohn wanted me on Blue Devil after Parris Cullens' departure, but the timing wasn't right in either case).

 

These samples are unusual in that they are pencil only; I usual went after jobs as both penciler and inker, and with the Exiles. Also, I followed a garden-variety plot posted online at the time involving Spider-Man and a villain I never heard of: Mr. Hyde. I never heard of the villain and it never occurred to me to look him up online, so I designed my own villain. That's probably only one of many reasons the submission got me no work. But it is a better example of tight pencils than a Dr. Fate sample I made some years earlier.
As with most of my samples from this era, and judging from them, it's no loss to the world of art and letters that they didn't yield me the assignment desired, or any assignment. (Usually, the work from Marvel, DC, Mirage Studios, Image Comics, and even Fantagraphics resulted from them asking me, not the other way around). But I'd like to think if I had gotten past the gatekeepers and actually drawn a strip like Spider-Man, I would have done a pretty good job on the real thing. For whatever reason, hypothetical samples never brought out the best in me.
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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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Brightnet Brigade: Promotion High-Speed Heroes!

Here is a series of promotional pieces I did including mailers, trade show displays, and more featuring a group of superheroes for Brightnet, an internet service provider.

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All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures are ™ and © Don Simpson 2019, all rights reserved (unless otherwise noted).