Pornoman & Kinky 2012

Pornoman Sketch
As far as I can tell, having the Pornoman cartoons on this site hasn’t done much to improve my SEO. If you do a search for “Pornoman” and “Kinky” together with either Google or Bing then the cartoons show up at the top of the list. Pornoman by himself doesn’t show up for before the second page. He’s got way too much competition from all the other Pornomen in the world.
Pornoman inked

Midnight Commando 2012

Midnight Commando Sketch
When I started posting the All Cover Comics entries I felt a compulsion to do new versions of each one to show how my art skills have progressed in the 21 years since I drew the originals.

I fought the compulsion.

Number one, I don’t have time to draw 20 new comic book covers.

Number two, those covers were jokes. Jokes rarely get funnier if the anatomy being depicted is more accurate or the vanishing lines all line up properly. In fact, too much reality can make a joke less funny.

The Midnight Commando is a good example of that. All the mayhem would have been less humorous if it looked more realistic.

So, instead of redrawing all the covers I drew new portraits of each series’ protagonist and created a couple of new header banners for this site. You’ve probably seen them by now. If not, the header banners load randomly so, if you just refresh this page enough times they should eventually show up.
Midnight Commando inked

Pornoman and Kinky #2

Pornoman and Kinky #2You’d think that, with names like Pornoman and Kinky, the characters would have had sex related superpowers and there would be a lot of pornorific action happening in each issue. It’s kind of obvious, right?

It’s possible that, if I had been publishing these “covers” myself I would have put more thought into exactly what Pornoman and Kinky got into in their crusades for justice. But probably not. Beyond the silliness of fighting crime while naked I’m pretty sure I didn’t put too much thought into what was depicted in the hypothetical contents of these comics. Since I was doing these gags for another publisher (High School Comics) and since they hadn’t asked for porn I kept the images and the gags pretty PG.

 

Pornoman and Kinky #1

Pornoman and Kinky #1With Midnight Commando I know that the idea of an ultraviolent hero came before the character’s name or costume design. With Pornoman and Kinky I’m pretty sure the title came first. Once I had the title I had to think up characters. Most superheroes wear skin-tight outfits when they fight crime. This is traditional. Superman wore a skin-tight outfit so everyone else does. Superman can lift mountains, fly into space and melt steel by looking at it. I say he gets to wear whatever he wants.

Those skin-tight outfits are drawn a bit more skin-tight than skin-tight exists in the real world. The way some artists draw superheroes the heroes are basically nude. And neutered. Most superheroes have Ken-doll crotches. Obviously what the world needed was a superhero who fought crime naked. Obviously.

Midnight Commando #5

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.