Midnight Commando #5

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Midnight Commando #5This is the last  Midnight Commando cover. For my contributions to All Cover Comics I invented four “superheroes” and then drew the covers for the first five issues of each series. Bob Pfeffer, one of the publishers of All Cover Comics commented that he hadn’t seen yesterday’s cover before. I’m guessing that means that not all the covers saw print.

Of the four series, Midnight Commando was the only one for which I didn’t create any antagonists for the hero. I’m guessing that I just thought I’d thought of enough funny ideas for covers that adding a villain didn’t seem necessary.(Whether any of these covers are actually funny is a judgement I leave to you.)

By 1990 there were quite a few vigilante heroes running around the comic book world. The Punisher was popular. Superhero comics were getting darker, grimmer, grittier. There were more heroes who killed their opponents. And there were a lot more villains who were mass murderers. I was never much a fan of killer vigilante series. I like a good revenge story and I don’t mind if the protagonist of a series sometimes kills the bad guys. I just thought that gun toting heroes didn’t fit very well in the superhero universes that I was reading. It didn’t make sense that regular no-kill heroes would tolerate the killer vigilantes and it really didn’t make sense that the vigilantes would stand a chance against some of the super powered mass murderers that were out there.

Midnight Commando #2

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Midnight Commando #2I called my minicomics publishing company Obscure Komix. I published three series:
Cheap Thrills: an anthology of short horror stories
The Highly Unlikely Adventures of Moe and Detritus: featuring the exploits of a couple of punks named (surprise!) Moe and Detritus
The Davey Thunder / Jack Lightning Show: a surreal series written by Glenn Ingersoll featuring a pair of DJs that we’d invented when we were in junior high

When I sat down to create these “covers” for All Cover Comics I wanted them to seem like covers of actual comics. Or at least as close to actual comics as I was going to get when drawing the art by hand. Real comics had consistent logos for each series and real comic book companies to put their logos on the the series they published. So I decided to use my Obscure Komix company as the publisher and I created a logo to be used for all the issues.

The logos had to be created by hand. This was 1990. There was no Illustrator and no Photoshop. I drew the OK logo by hand and then reduced it using the photocopiers at Kinkos. I did the same thing with the Midnight Commando logo. In 1990 photocopiers weren’t good at laying down areas of solid black, usually you ended up with an inconsistent dark gray. The image above is scanned from the original artwork and it’s easy to tell the difference between the photocopied logo and the black ink of the drawing. Even adjusting for contrast in Photoshop doesn’t make them match.

Midnight Commando #1

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Midnight Commado #1For about two years, from 1988 to 1990, I published a series of minicomics, 19 in all. I sold, traded and gave them away to friends, acquaintances, and folks all over the country. I also contributed illustrations to other minicomics and small press publications. When I left California in 1995 all of my published minis and all the minis and zines I’d collected got packed away. In 2004, when he cleaned out the old homestead, my brother mailed boxes of that material up to me here in Seattle.

Last year I finally started going through those boxes. A large part of my inspiration for doing that was to find those original 19 minicomics. I wanted to submit them to the upcoming volumes 2 and 3 of the Newave book series. I’d been namechecked in the first volume so I’d like to make a showing in one of the new volumes.

I found copies of most of the original minis. Better yet I also found the original art and the xerox layouts I used when I printed the issues at Kinkos. I also found a bunch of other art that I submitted to other publications. I’ll be posting selections of that over the next few weeks.

The first batch will be a series of contributions I drew for the All Cover Comics series. There’s not a lot online about the minicomic. I’m not sure how many issues it ran or who all contributed. It was published by Randy Paske and Bob Pfeffer under their High School Comics imprint. The concept behind the series was simple – each issue featured the covers of imaginary comic books. I suppose someone might have submitted serious cover illustrations but, if so, I don’t remember them. I invented four series and drew five covers for each.

First up here is Midnight Commando. I didn’t come up with a backstory for any of the characters. I doubt that they needed one. And the more you have to explain a joke the less funny it gets.

 

Origin of My Obsessions

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Amazing Spider-Man 103Amazing Spider-Man #103 is the first comic book I ever bought. It’s also the both the first story and the first comic I can remember reading. In all likelihood my mom bought it for me but I know I bought each subsequent issue myself. My brother and I got small monthly allowances and most of mine went to buying Spider-Man each month. The date on the cover is December 1971. Since magazines post dated their issues by about four months that issue was probably on the stands in September. I would have been a little more than seven years old. I’d obviously read other stories prior to this one – after all, I knew how to read. But this is the story that made its mark. If you look at the type of things I draw and the sorts of stories I read then Spider-Man #103 looks like a big sign post pointing me toward those interests.

I might have known who Spider-Man was before I read this comic. The Spider-Man cartoon series had played on television from 1967 to 1970 and it’s possible I saw episodes of it. I don’t remember. I do know I hadn’t read a Spider-Man comic before this issue.

It’s a strange one to have started with. Most of Spider-Man’s previous adventures took place in New York City where he fought various super powered criminals. This story (running in issues 103 and 104) removed Spidey from his usual stomping grounds to the Savage Land, a Lost World in Antarctica inhabited by dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. There he encounters a giant monster, the survivor of a crashed alien ship. It’s a sort of a retelling of King Kong without the final act of Kong getting dragged back to New York. I hadn’t seen King Kong yet so the story was new to me.

After this story Spider-Man returned to fighting supervillains in New York. I kept reading his adventures until sometime in the 1990s. I read a lot of other comics about a lot of other superheroes but Spidey remained my favorite. He wasn’t so powerful that his victories came easily. He was smart. He was poor. His enemies were weirdos – the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Hammerhead, Man-Wolf, the Vulture, the Sandman and so many others. Eventually I gave up reading monthly comics. I no longer had the budget or the time to get to the comic store on regular basis so I didn’t miss the latest issues. I haven’t bought an issue in over 15 years now. While I occasionally look at collected editions of recent Spider-Man stories at the library I don’t pay a lot of attention to the character any more.

I’ve still got that first comic. I haven’t read it in years. I’m almost afraid to read it again. It’s unlikely to hold up as well in reality as it does in my memory. It’s in one of the 18 long boxes of comics that survived the culling I did of my collection back in 2004. Did so many of my interests start with that comic or did it just embody them?

I already loved dinosaurs. This story had them. It had a lost world where they still survived. It had ape men and ruined temples. It had jungles. It had a misunderstood monster. It had a giant monster. It had mysterious aliens. It had a jungle man and his faithful saber-toothed cat. It had a superhero who couldn’t fly. For some reason, very few of the superheroes I’ve invented can fly.

It didn’t have examples of all my obsessions. It would have been a really messy story if it had. But that’s okay. It would be sad if I had developed all my obsessions before I was eight.