My History in Comics, Part 1 - My First Published Comics Work

 

I do not know when I first saw or read a comic book, but it was during my preschool years. I recall seeing comic books in spin racks at drugstores and supermarkets and being drawn to them, and I remember looking at comic books my cousins had left at my grandparent’s farm when I was perhaps 3 or 4.

My first notion to try drawing comic book stories came around age 5 when another boy my age was showing the other boys a homemade comic book that his older brother had drawn. The idea that we kids could produce our own comic books was exciting, and the desire to draw my own comic book stories was planted in me, staying with me over the years.

In junior high I read in a vocational guidance book that comic book work was highly undesirable—hard work, impossible deadlines, low pay, low status, no job security, no retirement, generally done by beginning artists and writers or else bottom-rung artists and writers unable to find work elsewhere—and not to be recommended as a career. So I decided at that time that if I were to ever do comics it would be as a hobby.

And I drew my own homemade comic book stories, as a hobby.

When I went to college I went in intending to become a photographer. But when halfway through college, doing a gig as a ‘party-pic’ photographer, I realized that I was headed not for a career photographing glamorous models in exotic locales, but more likely a lifetime of taking wedding pictures and school pictures. And it was time to declare a major.

In my heart of hearts I wanted to write stories and do artwork. And I admitted to myself that the stories I enjoyed most were comic book stories, and the artwork I enjoyed most was comic book art, so I gave in to my natural inclinations and decided to try for a comic book career, even if it meant being a starving artist for the rest of my life.

So I majored in pencil drawing, the one major that the college I attended offered that might apply to doing comic book art.

During my last year in college, in the fall of 1976, the editor of DC's Freedom Fighters comic announced a letter page logo contest in which the prize for the winning entry was an original script. Seeing as I was shooting for a career in comics, I decided that I wanted very much to see and have an actual comic book script to use as a model in writing my own comic book stories, so I submitted a letter page logo.

I don't have any photocopies of the final penciling, but here are the roughs for the logo I did:

I did the final art on bristol board and the art is dated August 28, 1976. I wasn't too confident in my inking, so I sent in just penciled art. I sent it with a cover letter that read, “Well, here's your new letters page logo. I was going to ink it, but heck! You can't expect your paying customers to do all of your work for you.”

I won the contest and they sent the prize script to me along with the original of the inked logo. The logo was inked at DC by John Workman, and that inked art appears at the top of this blog entry. The art with the coloring suggestion overlay I included (mainly to show how I would color the lettering) is below:

The penciling was for an entire logo, including lettering. However, the staff at DC decided they liked the previous lettering better, so they only used the illustration I did of the characters in the book clustered around a letter they were reading, along with a flagstaff that had an eagle on top, a flagstaff from which the flag with the logo lettering fluttered. Although one wing was in shadow and not fully articulated, the eagle did have two wings.

Unfortunately, when they pasted in the old lettering, it went right over the right wing of what had been an eagle with two wings, so the characters were now depicted as standing under an eagle with just one wing. I still cringe to see the printed logo, even today.

 

                                                                                                                                © 1977 DC Comics

 

The logo first appeared in Freedom Fighters #8, with a cover date of June 1977, and was printed twice as large in Freedom Fighters #9. I think they used the logo for the remainder of that series, at least through issue #15, July/Aug 1978.

The next installment of My History in Comics will probably take a look at some cover art I did for the Buyer’s Guide for Comic Fandom, and “Mr. Mystery Artist.”

 

 

Update on the Past Eleven Years

Hello. Eleven years ago I started the Armstrong Comics blog with the idea of doing an online comic strip, but was only able to make a couple of posts before other things came up that caused me to put the blog on hold—things such as the death of my mother, settling the estate, going back to work as a test examiner, and other such matters.

Meanwhile, my eyesight deteriorated. By 2015 I was functionally blind in one eye. And with the other eye, the “good” eye, it was like seeing the world from the bottom of a pond. Everything had a yellow-green tint and looked dim and fuzzy.

I developed double vision, then triple vision, then more. When I would look at a line I would see a “ghost” line above it, another ghost line below it, and another ghost line to the side. Hard to draw when all the lines are made fuzzy by the extra lines layered around them.

Both my father, and my grandmother on my mother’s side, had macular degeneration, which is not treatable. I figured that was what I probably had and resigned myself to never doing artwork again. Came close to giving away all my art equipment, supplies, and related materials.

However, I had cataract surgery done to both eyes in 2019 and the results were amazing. With one eye I now see well enough to drive without glasses. With the other eye I now see well enough to read, write, and draw without glasses. And with the right sort of glasses, I can use both eyes at the same time and see in stereo.

So lately I’ve been toying with the idea of returning to doing artwork. This inked Spider-Ham drawing is from about two weeks ago.

 

Rip Van Winkle wakes up.

Just checking to see if Armstrong Comics is still active and working, if I can still post to it.