MARCH MARVEL MADNESS CONTINUES!

As I mentioned yesterday, aside from my regular teaching gig this week, I’m at the pencil and inking boards working on a few pages for a Marvel job, and so, I’m hauling out some odd, obscure and lost things I’d done for Marvel over the years (mostly in the 90’s and early aughts).  I never did anything for the actual comic book, but did quite a bit of work for the X-Men office through the licensing department.  (I know, who thinks of me as an X-Men guy?!?!?)  The cover above, is a fairly large painting (original is 12×18) , used (I think) for the cover of a fast food chain giveaway comic book.  My brain says Pizza Hut, but I can’t find it online.  Anyway…the basic layout wasn’t mine, I was sent a layout drawing from the license dept. (clearly used again for the cover of the video box to the right, either before or after I did mine, I don’t know which artist rendered that other version…) that I final penciled and painted.  It’s really “drawing in colour” rather than actual painting, as I didn’t really understand the basic techniques at the time.  I’ve since done a half dozen other paintings, and have learned a thing or two about colour, mostly that I’m better off doing it in Photoshop.

The interior page to the left is from the same project.  Again, I don’t have a copy, and it was at least fifteen years ago, so your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell is happening in the story.  I do recall that the tower of X-Men happily posing just below, is the back cover and I have a few other interior pages in the box.  Beyond that, anyone ever see this in print at a Burger King somewhere?

There are something like twenty of the video boxes, Mike Parobeck did four or five, and I did the rest.  I’ll include more here today and tomorrow, but I don’t have colour versions of all of them, as I was never sent a set of the boxes.  ( I have found them at stores, and bought copies, but don’t have the full set.  Sigh…you can see there was never a strong duty to send artists their printed work for 3 dimensional objects anywhere near as much as their comic art.  The licensing team is on their own to find the stuff in the real world.)

Pogs.  Ah, pogs.

Those useless frauds perpetrated against kids in the nineties?  Well, I participated in the crime.  These are some of the X-Men pog sheets we created for the craze.  These sheets were impossible to pose, as all the heads had to line up neatly in the cut-out areas, while still drawing some sort of group shot.  Ech.  I’m not embarrassed by the drawing, but the gig itself isn’t one to tell mom about.   I can’t recall how many of these pog sheets I did, but these are the only two I could find in the basement in a box.  If the craze ever comes back, I’m all set to rule.

The Avengers cover above is the first paying gig I ever had at Marvel.  It’s inks over a lovely cover by Sam Kieth,creator of THE MAXX, ZERO GIRL, and star-illustrator of WOLVERINE fame, amongst so much else.  Sam and I started out in the biz somewhat together, and worked in a few indy projects before hitting Marvel and DC.  In fact, I introduced Sam to his first DC editor, which got him a Secret Origins gig.  When Sam was given his first Marvel cover, he asked me to ink it saying “I would make his exotic looking figures look more Marvel Style”.   I LOVE Sam’s exotic looking figures, but did as asked.  The end result is an odd mixture of both of us at once.  Much like the time I inked Mignola…it doesn’t alway work.  But it did lead to my first cheque from the House of Ideas.

Above is some pages I did for Moon Knight.  There was a lot of comparison between Moon Knight and Batman (deservedly so) and editor-at-the-time Joey Cavalieri decided to really play that up for a while, asking noted Batman artists to do a dimension -hopping story where Moony ended up in the Miller-Verse, the Infantino-Verse, the Kelley Jones-verse, etc.  in MOON KNIGHT #42 (1990’s, probably about ’95?) I stepped in to do the Sprang-Verse pages (about seven in total) as the real Dick Sprang wasn’t well at the time.    The silly Pool Shark cover came from an annual printed later that year.

So much Lost Marvel work, I still haven’t scratched the surface, but I’ll leave you with this one for today…the cover of “SALES TO ASTONISH“, a Marvel giveaway to retailers to promote their 2099 line…which didn’t seem to help.  I’m not sure why I was asked to do the cover, as I had nothing to do with the line itself…except at one point had been offered Ravage 2099 as a penciling gig, and was too busy to say yes.  Escaped with my life on that one.

Tomorrow, Nepotism Thursdays strike again, with my WIFE’S first work for Marvel (and some of my many “lost” Spider-Man pieces!)

Ty the Guy

MARVEL ARTWORK YOU’VE NEVER SEEN

In honour of the fact that I’m doing some comics illustratin’ for Marvel at the moment (no telling you what it is yet, but it’s fun, fun, fun!), I figured I’d dig through the library all this week, to find some Marvel work I’ve done, that you guys have likely NEVER seen.  I’m not talking about comics  (Spidey-Torch, Mad Dog, Avengers, Ren & Stimpy and others) but things I’ve done for their toy department, licenses, special projects and other sundry items that fill an illustrator’s time.  All Marvel, All Week!  Collect them ALL!

Up above is the cover to a Fantastic Four DVD that collected up episodes of their cartoon from the mid-nineties, I think it only came out in Europe, as I’ve never been sent a copy, nor seen a colour version of the artwork.   Nevertheless, it was my first time drawing the famous first family (professionally, I mean…I must have drawn the Thing a zillion times as a child) and it was a little disappointing that I couldn’t draw Ben in his more familiar Kirby design…but the client wanted him “on model” for the look of the series.

Next , the first of MANY X-Men video boxes I did for the animated show that ran on FOX TV in the nineties.  I was a little ticked that they threw the title card over top of Wolverine’s arm for the first one, which mucked up the image a bit in my opinion (you’ll notice I figured out to work around it on the next two…), but I couldn’t have been happier with the colours that Paul Mounts put overtop of all three.  Somewhere in the house, I have Paul’s original colour pieces for these, done in gorgeous dyes, with a real airbrush!  Oh, the labour we artists had to put in, back in the primitive 20th Century!  Paul was nice enough to trade me all the colour art for one of the black and white pieces.  Hell of a trade on my end.

As I said, I did tons of art for the X-Men series, including designing the official jackets for the cast, with a fairly cool Wolverine patch on the back (that you can see a bit of in the corner of the video boxes, that little Wolvie is from the patch).  I may not be able to find the original art for that, but worst-case-scenario, I’ll find someone to model the jacket for ya.

Doing these covers was a lovely stretching exercise for my art brain, as I was doing them at the same time as Batman Adventures stuff in the late nineties.  Some days it took a few hours to shake the Bruce Timm out of my hands, and try to channel the more illustrative look of the Marvel house style.  At first I expected they wanted me to make the covers resemble the show designs, but they insisted I do nothing of the sort, and said “Draw it in your own style”.  Something I’m not sure I have any more.  But these are close to it, I suppose.

Tune in tomorrow for some Marvel 2099 artwork you’re not expecting, a couple of Moon Knight pages you’ve never seen, and plenty more X-Men…and then on Nepotism Thursday, my wife’s first ever coloring job for Marvel…and how it nearly ended the marriage!   And yes, it was all my fault, dear.  (She’s reading this, gotta be cool, gotta be cool…)

Ty the Guy

Doing these covers was a lovely stretching exercise for my art brain, as I was doing them at the same time

X-Men 2: The Last Stand

Okay, not really!  This is one of the spoof covers that Ty did for the Mad Magazine San Diego Special edition.  It’s been recently reprinted (page 23)  in the new Mad collection, MAD About Superheroes (on sale in fine stores everywhere!).

Mad Magazine pages for sale

Keiren

Madly Mine, and now Yours.

When I first got into the funnybook business, well over sixty years ago…back in what we used to call “The Golden Age”, I had one dream and one dream only:  to someday work for Mad Magazine.  Of course, sixty years ago, Mad would have been two years in the future, but I was nothing if not precocious, and forward thinking.

So, just to show off, I’m running some of my Mad artwork on da homeblog, from time to time, and perhaps one or two of my strips from the late, lamented National Lampoon.  Today we see some more of the GREATEST COMICS OF THE DECADE covers, created for Mad’s San Diego Comic Convention promo of last year.   (I wish I could run the entire article, which was written by Evan Dorkin, but copyright issues prevent me!).   Here’s the rough work, and the final art on two more of these…

The rough was meant to look like an old Superman annual cover,  with captions suggesting how dull all of it was to see again and again.  The editor eventually opted for one image, and I wrote some cover copy to go with it.  Below is the final.

And here’s the rough work, and then final art for the X-Men cover for the same article.  I thought the casual body language of the characters sitting around the kitchen came off fairly well for so small a drawing (The originals for all of these are about eight inches tall, and the sketch itself is probably only three inches high!)  That’s probably size-as for the upload to the right.  I often find that drawing the rough sketch so tiny is the best way to make sure everything “reads” when it’s printed down at the small size in the final article.    Down below is the final, coloured version of the faux cover.  See you later with a few more of these…

Ty the Guy

Wow, I was clearly the reference for the busty babe in the Superman cover–right, honey?  Right?

Keiren

Credits

I’m not going to do a list of Ty’s credits when there are a number of places online that keep a thorough list…trying to get Ty to remember all the work he’s done always reminds me of a story of the actor Richard Burton*:  a reporter once showed him a list of movies Burton had been in hoping to trigger some interesting anecdotes.  Turns out that Burton had no memory of half of them and kept asking the reporter why he thought he had been in them.  Okay, that was because Burton was a roaring drunk, and Ty doesn’t touch a drop of the stuff…but Ty’s memory is about as bad.