Acts of a Vengeful God Destroyed My Art.

So, like a week ago, I posted a quick commission sketch I recently did of a Green Lantern character Mark Waid and I created, like fifteen years ago.  I did it for a Green Lantern fan named Christopher Matusiak.  It was on green paper, and I used pencil, ink, marker, pencil crayon, blackboard chalk and other tools I’m sure I’ve forgotten.  Maybe some hair tonic and crushed walnuts, how do I know, I wasn’t all there towards the end.  It turned out not too bad, and it looked like this:

 

BREEON, an obscure Green Lantern from one of the annuals, and a back up story at that!

So, we sent off the package, and Christopher emailed me on Monday to tell me it had arrived, after getting soaking wet along en route, and now the drawing is a green smudge on the inside of the cardboard envelope it was sent in.  Dead, destroyed, it is an EX-drawing.  It is no more.

So I did Christopher another drawing this afternoon, the same character yelling at his Green Lantern ring.

 

STUPID GREEN RING! ANSWER ME!! WHO KILLED THE LAST SKETCH?

I’ll be wrapping this one up in tin foil and sealing it in wax before it goes in the box.  And since I have a blog, I post it here, just in case it dies en route and no one gets to see it.

I lost the original art for some fairly decent Batman Adventures covers this way as well.  They were shipped to a museum in Europe as part of a Batman Anniversary display a while back, and shipped back soaking wet,  ruined.

 

This was Ruined

All Destroyed

Dunked and Runny

I’ve lost a ton of original Stig’s Inferno pages to water damage, and some original Wally Wood pages to a cat pulling a full pot of liquids over onto them.  The cat has since passed away and the police were willing to call it “natural causes”.

Clearly Poseidon has never forgiven me for beating him at rock paper scissors.  We met at a party, he got all competitive about this and that, cause there were girls there, you know.  he challenged me to the rock paper scissors thing, and I knew  he would never go for “paper” because he doesn’t really understand what it is, and I stuck with “rock” until I totally whipped his ass, and now he curses my artwork with water damage every couple of years, just to remind me we’re all ultimately his bitch.

Ty the Guy, out!  WHOOOSH!

Here now, you comic book moment of zen:

The issue featuring the original appearance of the wildly popular Green Lantern named Breeon. This is where the craze started. You'll notice that the shwred editor-at-the-time did not even mention the Breeon tale on the cover. How well he understood the character's appeal.

Unseen Art by Ty

Sorry for the sparse posting lately…we’ve been busy doing that working-for-a-living thing around here, some Simpsons, some Mad Mag stuff, doing some final corrections on my Harvey Pekar/Marvel comics story, and a little superhero-ing production work, FINALLY sending off the Johnny Canuck comic for the printers (out in a couple of days now!).

Since there won’t be any new top lists for at least another week or so, I thought I’d devote a couple of days to some of my many unseen pages…things for projects that were never published, or thing published in small runs, art for private commissions or projects not really comics related, amusing things you’ve probably not seen, and some of them turned out rather nice.

A sampling:

This was done as a commission a few years ago, back when I was in the middle of drawing batman in the “animated version” like this:

 

(A convention sketch of animated Batman done a couple of months ago, in that old style)

I think I was having such a good time NOT drawing in the animated style for that Bat-Mite piece up above, that I overdid it on the “Bolland-isms” in the inking.  I forget who ended up getting that piece, but I still have a xerox of it, so you get to see it.

Next, a commission I did a few weeks ago (but took forever to actually get out to the fellow who asked for it, sorry Christopher

The world famous BREEON, the Green Lantern!

Christopher Matusiak has this wonderful collection of Green Lantern sketches on all green paper, often drawn by the artist who created that particular Green Lantern.  Well, I happened to have created an obscure Green Lantern from an annual or a Quarterly (I don’t recall which), written by Mark Waid, named Breeon, and Christopher asked me to contribute to the collection.  I hadn’t drawn on coloured paper since I was a kid, and I had so much fun I’m going to do lots more.  There’s some blackboard chalk in there as a highlighter…I had some in my pocket from earlier in the day when I’d been teaching my cartooning class, and figured “why not?”.

This is ancient, one of the first things I ever drew and got paid for:

A commission for a local comic store in Toronto, (The Dragon Lady…and they’re still around after all these years, too!)  for their newsletter, highlighting the “Direct Sales” comics that were taking the world by storm in the mid-eighties.  I started working professionally about a year after this piece, I don’t think I’d even thought of Stig yet.

Coming up in the next while:  Unseen pages from a never-published issue of Legion of Superheroes I drew.  Pages from the yet to be published Batman: Brave and Bold cartoon comic I drew a year or so ago and has been on a shelf, unseen production work for the DC direct figures I designed, rejected covers, and more!

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your unseen and pulped comic book moment of zen:

My cover for the infamous Elseworlds Annual. So offensive, it was only released in Ireland, look it up.