Max and his team. The little girl is the daughter of the woman with the glasses and the man on the far right. The boy with the hat is the girl’s cousin. The young man with the shaved head is the team’s mechanic and technician. The blonde is the team’s psychic. Don’t all teams need a psychic?

The early Miracle Max was sort of an adopted uncle to a pair of kids. The girl here is the daughter of the two of the scientists of his team of adventurers. The boy is her cousin.

This is another example of inking with Micron pens. I love the things. I was so happy when a friend introduced me to them. For years I used refillable technical pens when I wanted clean consistent lines. The technical pens were fairly expensive and required a lot of care and maintenance. These days I do most of my inking with a brush but I still use Microns for straight lines and when I want to do detail work.

I’m fascinated by primates – lemurs, monkeys, apes and, especially, hominids – the offshoots of the human evolutionary line that probably have gone extinct. I say probably because human beings have been seeing mysterious hairy manlike creatures on every continent except Antarctica up until the present day. There’s the Yeti and the Yeren in Asia, Bigfoot in North America, the Yowie in Australia and a variety of creatures in Africa and South America.

Miracle Max was originally conceived of as a sort of simian, more family friendly Doc Savage. He had team of scientists and adventurers that he worked with. Sometimes he fought international criminals. Sometimes he tracked down mysterious creatures – lake monsters, sea serpents, skyfish and other things.

This illustration was done to both play around in that version of Max’s universe and to practice inking with Micron pens. I put as many examples of primates, both real and anomalous, in the illustration as I could fit. The featured humans are members of Max’s team.