MARVEL MADNESS CONTINUES WITH NEPOTISM THURDAYS: VALENTINES ATE MY BRAIN!!

This Lost Marvel March Madness stuff is really too much to put up all at once, or even over the space of one little week, so I might have to post TWICE today, just to get half of the Spider-Man pieces out.

But to start today… Valentine’s Day–a day of love and affection and tension that nearly disrupts a young marriage.  (I should have put these up two weeks ago ON Valentine’s Day, but that’s my daughter’s birthday, and we spend Valentine’s Day differently around here.)

Anyway…this set of Valentine’s Day cards (loosely based on the look of the Spider-Man animated series of the day, though in truth, it’s a little more Batman Animated than it should have been) were to be the first colour job for my wife for Mighty Marvel.  She’s got a great eye for colour, and as I’m a control freak (this comes up later in the story)

I thought it was a way of keeping all the work I was sending into DC and Marvel “in house” at my end.  I was already penciling and inking, and if I could get the wife the colour gig, I was home free.  No more lack of control on things.

Did I mention I used to be a control freak?

So as I’m doing up the cards, I’m starting to hate what they look like.  It’s not the right inking style, it’s not the right compositions, I don’t like the catchphrases I’m coming up with…the whole thing was driving me crazy, like it was the Sistine Chapel ceiling or something.  But they were due at the office at the end of the week, an in olde tyme terms that meant THURSDAY.  (We had to send all the art in by FedEx, instead of the intertubes).  So I missed the Thursday delivery date, and on Friday morning, I have them done, late enough to enrage the editor, and bring me my sense of tension and frustration at my own shortcomings.

So with this roiling inner mononlogue spitting at my brain from the inside, it’s time to hand them over to Keiren to colour.  Her first job, she’s nervous, so naturally I start announcing that some of the cards are still not good enough and I re-draw two of them after she’d started colouring them.  (On Xeroxes…we coloured on Xeroxes).  Then I have to head to Kinko’s to make copies, and decide it’s best to leave the originals in the Xerox machine at the Kinko’s, as I leave, and discover them gone, when I return half an hour later.

That helped my mood, of course.  That and my wife having spent the previous night so ill she was throwing up and couldn’t get our son to school in the morning, so I had to walk him (another precious hour gone!).  When I got back, none of the cards were coloured yet, something about a blinding migraine for my wife that was literally robbing her of her vision.  The mood continues to improve.

But a card here and there was getting finished.  It looked like we might have a shot of making the FedEx drop off deadline when the phone rings.  It’s my agent; I have an audition to be a regular character on some game show thing, being produced in Canada.  Obviously, I didn’t have time to leave the Valentine’s Cards behind, I was pitching in with the colours, I was still tweaking the inks.  There simply was no way to make this audition, which was pissing me off.

So I went to the audition.  Didn’t get the job.  Came home.

And amazingly enough, Keiren didn’t finish the entire job while I was gone.  Which helped my mood, of course.

In the long run, with me pitching in on the colours, (I’m not sure the six year old didn’t colour one of them…) and arguments escalating all day, we got the set done and had to drive out the airport for the late night FedEx drop off.  Made it with a whole three minutes to spare, too!

And here’s the capper to the day.  And I come off smelling like a rose in this one, too.   My wife at one point, said I’d been a real pain in the ass all day, and that I was bossing her around, heedless of her feelings and being very unsupportive, and I answered with the only answer possible at the time:  I said “If you’d stand up for yourself more, I wouldn’t be bossing you around so much, so really it’s your fault for not telling me to stop with more conviction.”

That apparently required an apology, which I believe I composed thusly:  “I’m sorry that you let me walk all over you.”

Male logic is wonderful.

And amazingly, we’re still married.  I’ve learned not to be a control freak, and she’s learned to ignore me and NOT let me yell at her.  It’s by far the happiest marriage on Earth nowadays, but once….

VALENTINES ATE MY BRAIN!!!

NEXT:  The Spider-Man drawing I did that ended up three stories high on billboards all over North America, but also on the side of the building my studio was in!

Ty the Guy

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Wow, honey–that’s actually what happened!  I’m shocked!  Heh. Although now that I’ve seen the art again, after soooooooooo many years, I have to say, wow, it is amazing that the marriage lasted! (So not my best work!)

And, it’s not that I don’t let you yell at me–it’s just that eventually you know that you’ll have to stop yelling…and then I usually have a few things to say.  Would anyone believe how pussy-whipped big, tough, alpha-boy Ty is?

Keiren

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Ahh–Pussywhip.  The dessert topping for cats!

Ty