TO BE CONTINUED…
I'm going to start the strip off on a 3-times-a-week schedule: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Come back Wednesday for installment two in the life and times of Joe Barker.
By the way, if you are not familiar with these Blogspot blogs, clicking on an image (such as each half of the above strip) will make the image larger and easier to read.
In 1983 I got the opportunity to create the visual design of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham.
Larry Hama called and asked me to come up with “something that does not look like Porky Pig.” He sent me some examples of what he did not want to see. One was the above imaginary cover by Joe Albelo depicting Peter Porker as Porky Pig wearing the top half of a Spider-Man suit. Another, shown below, was Marie Severin's take on Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, with a “heavy” emphasis on “porker”:
So I came up with something that did not look like Porky Pig.
©1983 Marvel Comics
There were two directives. From Larry came the directive to come up with something that did not look like Porky Pig. From Tom Defalco's series concept came the directive that Peter Porker was to be 4 heads tall and Captain Americat was to be 5 heads tall. I did my best to deliver on those directives.
I wish Tom had simply stated that Peter was to be shorter than Steve, or that Steve was to be taller than Peter. I always tried to design characters that would be easy to draw. In the instance of Peter Porker, Spider-Ham, I start by using a circle template to draw a circle that will be the foundation of the head, and then mark off three spaces below that for the rest of the body. But by having a mandated scale to adhere to, I was not able to design the character with proportions that wanted to come out of the pencil. When I draw the character, Peter tends to have either a head that looks too big, or a body that stretches out a bit more than 4 heads. So, even though I did the visual design of the character, drawing the character in a way where he comes out 4 heads tall has always been a challenge for me.
Also, I designed the character without muscles. I always viewed Peter as being made of Silly Putty. But Joe Albelo, in inking the character, always put in muscles. I don't know if he did it on his own initiative, or did it at Larry's direction. I never discussed it with them.
J. Jonah Jackal went through a series of name changes before the first script was finalized. In Tom Defalco’s series/story concept, the character was called Jackson J. Jawbone. In the initial script he was called B. Bowser Bulldog, Jackson J. Jawbone, J. Jonah Jacka_ _* [I’m doing my best to keep this a family-oriented blog for all ages], and finally J. Jonah Jackal. I designed the look of the character with J. Jonah Jacka_ _* in mind, and have always had that name in mind when drawing him, and would think of him as a braying donkey, not a jackal.
The homage panels were scripted in. Tom included with the script photocopies of specific panels from Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby stories he wanted in the story. Although I’m a fan of Ditko and Kirby, I'm not that much a big fan of doing homage panels. But the script called for it, and I did my best to include them and to put my own spin on them so that they wouldn't be mere copies.
I tried to insert as many nonverbal gags and background gags as I could. And there are at least two Easter eggs in that first Spider-Ham story. The “old army buddy” who slaps Steve on the back on page 6 was one of the characters in “Recondo Rabbit,”--the top sergeant who goes to Heaven. I turned his death into a temporary one that turned out to be near-death experience. And on page 16 Super Santa makes a cameo appearance on an arcade game called “Super Santa Sleigh Ride.” The stories of both these characters are discussed in earlier installments of this series of blog posts.
©1983 Marvel Comics
The “town crier” beagle on the front of the Daily Beagle building (as shown on page 5 and throughout the series) I added as I thought there should be a logical reason for the name of the newspaper. A town crier was the only explanation I could come up with for a paper named for a beagle.
It was my idea to have most or all villains smoke cigarettes, a tradition that I continued in subsequent stories. And as with most all of my stories, I penciled the title lettering and sound effects. I hope the letterer of the book didn’t resent my encroachment into his territory.
That first story, “If He Should Punch Me!” appeared in a one-shot comic called Marvel Tails #1. Later, Larry Hama told me that after it hit the stands the distributor asked when the next issue would be coming out—something that the distributor had never asked before. So the decision was made at Marvel to make this one-shot a series.
I’ll discuss the subsequent Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham series in the next installment of My History in Comics.
Story ©1982 by Larry Hama, Artwork ©1982 by Mark Armstrong
The year was 1981. I got a quick reply from DC. Once again I failed to break through the slush pile and got a form-letter rejection. Marvel took a few months longer to respond, though. When they responded it was in the form of a phone call, probably from Denny O'Neil, but perhaps from Larry Hama. They liked what I had sent and would be sending me a script for a story for Bizarre Adventures, a black & white newsstand comic magazine published by Marvel. The story, “Recondo Rabbit,” may well be the only funny animal war story ever done, combining funny animal humor and sight gags with the horrors of war.
I got the script by FedEx which was a fairly new service called Federal Express at the time. Most all my communications with Marvel would be by telephone and FedEx. The script, by Larry Hama, featured a rabbit with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder after a tour in Vietnam. The script called for the first and last pages of the story to be mostly photocopies of the same panel. But being very gung ho and ambitious at the time, I asked for and received permission to do the first and last pages in airbrush.
Story ©1982 by Larry Hama, Artwork ©1982 by Mark Armstrong
The story was written by Larry Hama who would later become editor of the Spider-Ham comics, and the inker was Joe Albelo who would later become my inker on the Spider-Ham stories I penciled.
Story ©1982 by Larry Hama, Artwork ©1982 by Mark Armstrong
Larry Hama had been in service and had been to Vietnam, but I hadn't. The John Wayne movie “The Green Berets” was conveniently broadcast on television right at that time and I got some inspiration from that. Also, my father loaned me some souvenirs and memorabilia from his time in Vietnam, and I was able to use that as reference material. And, as I drew the story, I listened to the Country Joe and the Fish song “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxEyg61LC4g . We didn't have YouTube in 1981, and I wouldn't get a computer until 1998, but I did have a Country Joe and the Fish record album I had gotten in a remainder bin for something like fifty cents. If you want to read the story with the same background music it was drawn to, read it while listening to “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag.”
Bizarre Adventures #31 has a cover date of April 1982. In 1982 we had a big recession and I hunkered down and did a few other things.
The Hardboiled Animal Comics #1 containing the “Roger Buck” one-pager is dated 1982. “Roger Buck was actually done in 1981, and was meant for Dennis Budd's Surf City Comics & Stories, but Dennis did not put out any more issues of Surf City after the issue containing “Surfin' Neanderthals!”
Hardboiled Animal Comics was published by Tim Fuller, who did the cover story for the Charlton Bullseye #2. Tim aspired to be publisher, and asked me to contribute. I had that unused “Roger Buck” piece in unused inventory, and sent him that. I also contributed to the jam-art cover.
The jam-art cover was done by Tim sending the same piece of bristol board to a series of contributors. I think I was the last one it was sent to, and I had to squeeze Roger Buck into the background. Had I known I was to be the last one to work on it, I might have done more with it, but I tried to leave space for still other contributors. I did sign it at the lower left-hand corner, but apparently there was a mishap at the printers and only a last portion of my name appears—half of the O, and the NG.
Also in 1982 I did an airbrush cover for The Duckburg Times #14, which was a fanzine devoted to Carl Barks and published by Dana Gabbard. The cover featured the early Oswald Rabbit and the early Woody Woodpecker, and referenced the fact that Oswald did not start out as a Walter Lantz character.
I first learned of the existence of airbrush paintings as an art form back in high school. I used to build model airplanes of balsa wood, tissue paper, fabric, rubber bands, and small gas engines. In the back of a model airplane magazine was an offer for a brochure for Paasche airbrushes. I wanted an airbrush to apply “dope” (lightweight airplane paint) to my models, so I sent off for the brochure.
What I got back was a booklet that reproduced gorgeous airbrush paintings. Then, when I went to Daytona Beach with a youth group, I saw an airbrush in action where a guy was doing airbrush paintings on t-shirts at a shop close to the beach. I was hooked on getting an airbrush.
The university where I got my BFA in drawing had no classes on airbrush painting. However, one of the instructors, Bill Armstrong (no relation) was familiar with them. He advised me to get a Thayer & Chandler model A airbrush, as he considered the Paasche brushes to be junk. He also advised me to use compressed nitrogen rather than compressed CO2 as a propellant, as the nitrogen would be less harmful to one's health over the long haul. I found a book on airbrush in the SMS library, and also bought a book on airbrush at the National Art Shop, where I purchased the Thayer & Chandler. I bought an air regulator and rented a tank of nitrogen for quite a few years until I finally got an air compressor. And I did, later, get a Paasche brush with a motorized reciprocating needle for doing detail work.
Besides Bizarre Adventures #31 and the cover of The Duckburg Times #14, I did a color air bush painting of Jack Bunny that appeared on the cover of Critters #8, and a black and white air brush painting of Jack swinging from a Fit to Print logo for Cat Yronwode's TBG column. I probably would have done at least one air brush cover for Charlton had I continued on there.
I’ve never tried doing an airbrush painting either in Photoshop or in Gimp, mainly because you don’t get to have any original art doing it that way. But I’ll probably get around to trying it out some time if there is a good, usable, digital equivalent to friskets.
Next up in this series, I discuss Spider-Ham.
In the aftermath of Charlton I sent a copy of “Rocket Rabbit!” to DC, and a copy to Marvel, along with a cover letter to each making my pitch. As before, I mentioned the gap left in the marketplace left by the departure of Gold Key, and probably added the argument that without kid comics on the market, there would be no replenishing of the readership to provide a market for comics aimed at older readers.
As I waited for a response from each company, those two Wacko Waddler one-pagers got printed in the Buyer's Guide, one in TBG #388, and the other shortly thereafter. And Dennis Budd printed “Surfin' Neanderthals!” in what turned out to be the final issue Surf City Comics & Stories. I'm not sure whether I did “Surfin' Neanderthals before “Rocket Rabbit!” or whether I did it after. But it got printed after.
I did “Surfin' Neanderthals!” in an exact opposite approach of how I did “Rocket Rabbit!” This time, I started with a panel near the middle—the large panel at the top of the last page—the panel where the characters evolve. Then I worked backwards, panel-to-panel, to the beginning of the story, then worked forward, panel-to-panel, to the ending.
The story was reprinted six years later by Fantagraphics in Critters #13.
I had a Chapter Two planned for the
fictional History of Surfin'--the discovery of inland surfing by
Surfo Boone using a birchbark surfboard and a bit of Indian magic to
create waves on rivers and creeks. But that got put aside as Dennis sold his comic shop and stopped publishing Surf City, and as a new opportunity for publication came up.
Coming up next in this series--the responses I got from DC and Marvel after they had a look at “Rocket Rabbit!”
One reason I had gravitated away from superheroes and toward funny animals was because comic shop owner Dennis Budd pushed me in that direction, turning me into a fellow fan of Carl Barks by loaning me a huge number of classic Barks comics. But another reason was that in the 1970s, Gold Key Comics (an imprint of Western Publishing) was the only comic book company soliciting contributions in the Writer’s Market book and in various writer’s magazines. Gold Key specialized in publishing licensed funny animal characters.
While still in college I was trying to come up with samples to send to Gold Key. I had in mind that I would spend a few weeks, or a few months at most, coming up with samples to put into my “Gold Key portfolio.” I figured I would get in at Gold Key, spend a few years there learning the tricks of the trade, then move on to DC Comics and do the superhero comics I had loved so much as a kid.
The first impression is always the strongest impression, so I did not want to approach Gold Key until I had a knock-out portfolio of samples to present to them. Coming up with impressive samples was taking more time and effort than I had expected. Also, I wanted to include at least one long story with the samples, to let them know I could write as well as draw, so I didn’t get stuck simply illustrating other people’s scripts. Coming up with stories longer than a page or two was proving to be a challenge.
I took time off from working on my Gold Key portfolio during the last several months of 1979 to do “Super Santa!” for Dennis Budd’s Surf City Comics & Stories. In January of 1980 I was ready to go back to working on samples of such characters as Mighty Mouse, Woody Woodpecker, and Daffy Duck, among others. Then I heard on the news on the radio or on television that Western Publishing was discontinuing their Gold Key line of comic books.
My effort to get into the comic book industry had hit smack into a brick wall. All that time and effort spent on samples for an opportunity that no longer existed. It was quite a setback.
So what to do next? At the time I thought of independent comics as glorified fanzines, so I did not even consider that route. I was fixated on doing 4-color mainstream work. I tried contacting DC and Marvel, but could not break out of their unsolicited submission slush piles.
Then the Charlton Bullseye experiment came along. Wikipedia explains the experiment this way:
According to the 1980 press release for the series, an artist showed up at the Charlton offices and offered to work for them for free in hopes of accumulating enough credits to get a job with one of the two leading comics publishers. Charlton Bullseye was based around this concept; contributors to the series were paid only in contributor copies, all original art was returned to the artists after publication, and contributors would hold the copyrights to any original characters they introduced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlton_Bullseye_(comics)
The experiment was announced in more than one fanzine/newszine. In the first announcement nothing was said about anything other than superheroes and many, such as Jim Engel, assumed that humorists and funny animal artists need not apply.
However, I contacted Charlton anyway, sending them a copy of “Super Santa!” and a two-page letter making a pitch for funny animals and kid comics, arguing that with Gold Key out of the picture there was now a void in the comics market place that needed to be filled.
I don't know what sort of pitches Tim Fuller and Arn Saba made, or what sort of samples they sent, but it worked. Charlton decided to make the second issue of the Bullseye comic book a funny animal issue. And I got a letter dated October 6, 1980, asking me, on the basis of “Super Santa!”, to send them an 8-pager. But the letter also stated, NO DUCKS!
I was sent some Charlton bristol board, which was slightly larger than Marvel bristol board, and had pre-printed margins in black rather than blue. Charlton could be different with the paper size because they owned their own printing press, and probably still used the same setup for photographing originals that they used back when original art was even larger. Marvel and DC however, were both having things printed by Sparta, which had evidently settled on 10” x 15” art on 11” by 17” bristol board.
But I used my own bristol board anyway, so there would never be any question as to who owned the original art.
As for the NO DUCKS! edict, that meant Waldo Waddler and Wacko Waddler were out of consideration.
Fortunately I had a non-duck character design on hand. About a year or two previous I had read a biography of Walt Disney and became interested in the story of how his studio had come up with a highly successful character, Oswald Rabbit, which was then stolen from Disney by an unscrupulous distributor. The loss of Oswald, and most of his animators, to that distributor led Disney and his friend Ub Iwerks to come up with Mickey Mouse as a substitute for Oswald. The distributor himself subsequently lost ownership of Oswald, and the character eventually ended up as part of the Walter Lantz stable of characters.
As an exercise in character design, I started speculating on how Oswald might have evolved at Disney over the decades had Disney not lost the character. That speculation became the initial starting point for the character I presented to Charlton. I fiddled with the visual design some more, just to make sure it was my own character I was submitting to Charlton and not Oswald. The name I gave the character, Jack Bunny, was derived from the term “jack rabbit.” And I whipped up a model sheet, dated October 9, 1980. So I must have gotten Charlton’s October 6th letter within 3 days, and did the model sheet immediately.
As for Jack’s personality, it was basically my own. I had Jack feel, think, say, and do what I myself might feel, think, say, or do if I myself were put in the circumstances I put Jack into.
I had written the story and was started on the art when I wrote back to Charlton on October 15th. I wrote the story panel by panel, one panel at a time. I started with what I thought of at the time as a “springboard opening,” patterned after the sort of opening panels Carl Barks used in most of his ten-pagers. Today I would call such an opening panel simply an instance of using narrative as an opening hook. When I did that first panel, I had no idea what would happen next in the story.
I wrote panel-to-panel to the bottom of the first page, being careful to get some sort of story situation going by the bottom of the page. Having a rocket sled in the story was just one of many possibilities I considered while doing the first page.
Then I skipped from the first page to the last page. I wanted a rousing, high-energy finish with a gag ending. So I prioritized that over whatever I might come up with in the middle.
I then alternated between working forward from the first page, panel-to-panel, and backward from the last page, panel-to-panel, until the two narrative streams met somewhere in the middle of the story. And I reported to Charlton in a letter mailed October 15th that I had finished scripting and was in the process of doing the art.
While in the midst of working on Rocket Rabbit, I did a little promotional piece and mailed it to Cat Yronwode to put in her Fit to Print column in the Buyer’s Guide. As a courtesy I also sent a copy of that promotional art to Charlton with a letter dated November 8th. I was slightly surprised to see that promotional piece included in the Charlton Bullseye #1 alongside panels by Tim Fuller and Arn Saba, as it was designed for Cat’s Fit to Print column. But I was delighted to see that promotional piece in color.
I got “Rocket Rabbit!” done and the artwork into the mail by the end of December. The Charlton Bullseye #2 was printed quickly, and I got my 50 contributor’s copies probably in April.
Charlton wanted me to do more Jack Bunny stories, and I was going to. The follow-up story would have been an airplane race in which Jack Bunny would meet stunt pilot Bonnie Rabbit. However, my parents and others were criticizing me for doing work for a professional company and not being paid any money for the work, which killed my enthusiasm for Charlton. And I couldn’t do the creative work without the necessary enthusiasm.
What did I do next? In the next post in this series we will take a look at the story, “Surfin’ Neanderthals!”
One of the first pieces I did for Dennis Budd’s Surf City Comics & Stories was a Wacko Waddler half-pager (“Here's Another April Fools' Day Gag”). I can't lay my hands on the issue of Surf City that it appeared in, but I was able to locate the original art and a scan of it is at the top of this post.
While visiting Dennis Budd and his wife Sandra at their home one time, I mentioned I was having difficulty inventing my own characters. Sandy suggested, “Why don't you base a character on yourself?” That kind of threw me. How do you base a character on yourself? Then I got the wild idea of basing a character not on myself, but on someone else's perception of me.
Somehow Dennis had gotten the idea that I was a practical joker (although I’m not). So I decided to invent a character that was a practical joker. Also, Dennis thought I had ridiculously short hair. It was the 1970s; some guys had hair to their shoulders, yet I had the same conservative haircut I have today. So I put stubble on the character's head. Also, I mentioned to Dennis one time that I was more comfortable with the 1950s when I was a kid than I was with the 1960s or 1970s. Dennis replied that he thought I was a throwback to the 1940s. So I gave the character wingtip shoes and put him in 1940s-style over-sized high-waisted pants with cuffs. As for the name, I borrowed part of the name from an earlier experimental character I had called Waldo Waddler. I named this new character Wacko Waddler.
I don't think I used Wacko Waddler for any stories in Surf City, but I did use him in a couple of one-pagers that appeared in the Buyer's Guide for Comics Fandom. Both of the one-pagers were the equivalent of two-page comic book stories, due to the tabloid size of the TBG.
As for the second Wacko Waddler one-pager, I do not remember which issue of the TBG it appeared in, and cannot lay my hands on my copy of that issue at the moment. The scan I made of it is from a photocopy I made from a physical copy of the TBG some time later. But it probably appeared within several issues of the first one-pager, perhaps the following month. Note that I had Wacko driving the same car I drove at the time, a 1970 Karmann Ghia, a car that is currently rusting away in my garage.
At the time of original publication I included my mailing address at the bottom of those two Wacko Waddler one-pagers, which brought me a lot of fan mail from readers of the TBG.
The main reason I did not do any additional Wacko Waddler one-pagers is that an unusual opportunity came up. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss Charlton, Jack Bunny, and “Rocket Rabbit!”
House ad on back cover of Surf City Comics & Stories vol. 2, no.3, 1979
Around the start of my last year in college a lawyer named Dennis Budd opened a comic shop on the edge of the SMSU campus. He would later go on to become a judge in the Traffic Court in Springfield Missouri. He was married to another lawyer, Sandra Skinner, who would later go on to teach law classes at one of the many colleges in Springfield.
Dennis was a Carl Barks fan who named his comic shop Duckburg Books & Comics. He told me he patterned his shop after the Rock Bottom comic shop in Columbia Missouri, and that he opened his own shop in Springfield as an experiment to gain some experience in running a business.
I showed Dennis some of my work and he started pushing me towards doing funny animal work, as he thought I would be wasting my life doing superhero stories. He started loaning me rare, valuable Barks comics from his extensive personal collection. This was back in the late 1970s when the Barks stories, for the most part, still had not been reprinted. And he did turn me into a Barks fan.
Dennis did cartooning as a hobby, and then started publishing as a hobby. He started a fanzine he named Surf City Comics & Stories. It was an 8-and-a-half by 11 magazine he had printed up at some quick-print litho shop there in Springfield that usually printed things like sale flyers for businesses. Dennis would have maybe a hundred or so copies printed up of each issue. He and his wife Sandy folded the sheets of paper themselves and used a long-reach stapler to staple the issues together.
I don't recall whether he asked me to contribute to Surf City, or if I asked to contribute to it. But either way it was inevitable that I would be contributing to it. At the time I felt as if I was doing him a favor by contributing to it, but in reality he was doing me the favor. Surf City got me to doing stories that were longer than a single page. And later, it was one of the Surf City stories that got me the opportunity to do a story for Charlton.
The sample I sent to Charlton was the Surf City story “Super Santa!”, which appeared in Surf City Comics & Stories vol. 2, no. 3, 1979. The story featured Chuck Duck, a character created by Dennis, that he named after Chuck Berry. I drew the character more like a duck character of my own, Waldo Waddler, than like Dennis’ Chuck Duck, and gave the character a hairstyle that more closely resembled Dennis’ hairstyle than the hair he put on his Chuck Duck. I did the story under my Mr. Mystery Artist pseudonym. I wrote it one panel at a time, panel by panel, not knowing what would come next as I wrote. Then I drew, lettered, and inked it panel by panel, one panel at a time.
I was still doing fanzine art on cheap student art paper. I found that if I inked with a technical drafting pen (such as Rapidograph, Staedtler Marsmatic 700, and Reform Refograph drafting pens) it was just barely possible to ink on that paper without the paper buckling and the ink bleeding and feathering. Hence, that unique inking style that Cat Yronwode would call “Armstrong's quirky inking style” in her TBG “Fit to Print” column.
The story was basically an extended dream sequence, ten pages long, filled with references to Carl Barks and superhero comics. I did “Super Santa!” at the pace of about a panel a day, starting in September 1979. By December 1979 I had it all penciled and lettered, but had only inked it to the end of page seven. It was a Christmas story, and it was nearly Christmas. So I took the pages to Dennis and suggested he print just the first seven pages. The way I had written the story, panel-to-panel, it could easily have ended on page seven. The only reason I had continued to page ten was that I wanted to do a ten-pager as so many of Carl Barks' stories had been ten-pagers. But I was getting sick and tired of the story after spending three or four months on it and told Dennis I would be happy to let him ink the last three pages. Dennis seemed eager to do the inking of those last three pages, and I think he did a good job.
The story was later reprinted in the Fantagraphics comic book Critters #11, 1987. The print quality of the Critters reprint was far superior to the murky quick-print version in Surf City. However, the scans of the story in this blog post are from the original Surf City version.
So Spider-Ham was not my first experience with a funny animal superhero.
The next post in this series will be about the creation of a comic book character inspired by myself, sort of--and yet not me at all. My History in Comics part 4 will take a look at Wacko Waddler.
The Buyer's Guide for Comic Fandom (also known as the TBG) was a weekly newspaper printed on newsprint. It was primarily advertising—retailers selling old comic books, ads for comic book conventions, things of that nature. It was published by Alan Light under the business name of Dynapubs Enterprises out of East Moline, Illinois. It measured about 11 x 17, and issues were typically around 80 pages in several sections.
Alan Light built his subscription base by advertising in mainstream comic books with small display ads. I started subscribing to the publication in the mid-1970s. The TBG was probably one of the things that influenced me towards trying for a career in comics.
I did three covers for the TBG: TBG #303 (Sept 1979), TBG #350 (Aug 1980), and TBG #373 (Jan 1981). I did all three of them under the “Mr. Mystery Artist” pseudonym. Why the pseudonym? Partly for the fun of it, but also partly as a crutch to take the pressure off of doing things under my own name. It permitted me to be less inhibited, and less likely to freeze up and get creative block.
All three were done in pencil, on cheap student-grade drawing paper. I sent all three to Alan Light at the same time, in the same package, and he spread out using them, printing one a year. When Alan asked for return postage to return the art, I told him to keep the art, so I do not have the originals. The following scans I found on the internet. I do have file copies of these issues of the Buyer’s Guide somewhere, in disorganized stacks.
While in college one of my original goals in comics was to get in at DC Comics and draw superheroes. Green Arrow was one of the characters I intended to do samples of.
I think you can see the heavy Neal Adams influence in both the Green Arrow cover and the Dr. Solar cover.
With the Warlord cover for TBG #373 You probably notice the heavy influence of Barry Smith’s Conan. You might also notice some influence of German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Like Barry Smith, I drew every blade of grass. And I did the same thing in multiple panels of the first Jack Bunny story “Rocket Rabbit” in the Charlton Bullseye #2, drawing every blade of grass.
When I first decided to try for a career in comics my original goal was to do superheroes of the typical sort. These three covers hint at what sort of work I might have ended up doing had I stayed on that path. However, my path was shifted towards funny animals, in part by a comic shop owner named Dennis Budd.
My first funny animal story, “Super Santa!”, was published by Dennis in his Surf City Comics & Stories, and included my Mr. Mystery Artist pseudonym:
I’ll tell you more about Dennis, Surf City Comics & Stories, and “Super Santa!” in the next installment of My History in Comics.
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.”
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.
