Not Branded Yet! Stuff You Won't See in CRAZY!

Followers on my social media know I was lucky enough to get an email from Marvel Entertainment senior editor Mark Paniccia back in May asking if I'd like to contribute to a 40-page one-shot revival of CRAZY! I teach college writing during the fall and spring semesters, and school had just let out, and I was a little rusty at the ol' drawing board, but I said, "Why not?!"

Webs and Shreds (and Thunder!): Three More Recent Drawings

Here are some more commission-like drawing (they're like what I would do for a convention or commission drawing, but these aren't sold yet!). The first is a Spidey pose traced from a 2005 sketchbook drawing I always liked, with the addition of a goofy Hulk figure. It's 11" x 14" on Aquabee sketchbook paper, colorized in Photoshop (although I could accomplish much the same effect physically with Dr. Martin's dyes).

A Signal, Two Girls, and Three Recent Ink Drawings!

I had some time to use India ink at Wizard World Pittsburgh July 26-28, 2019, something I haven't done in many years, and produced three fairly nice ink drawings, all on 11" x 14" Aquabee sketchbook paper, with a Hunt #102 "crowquill" pen.

Spidey Stampede: A Decades-Delayed Office Dash!

This is a drawing I just completed in pen and ink on 11" x 14" Aquabee sketchbook paper (nice stuff that takes pen and ink really well; it's almost like Bristol board). I had this pad for ages and decided to cut the spiral-wire binding and use it for warm-up drawings and convention sketches.

Patriotic Pen and Ink: An Orphaned Commission!

Perhaps it's all the deep divisions right now in this great land of ours, or (more likely) my own perverse prankishness, but when a collector contacted me about doing a commission over the weekend with instructions that he wanted me to be me, this is the idea I woke up with this morning. So, I let 'er rip. Unfortunately, at the pencil stage (below), said collector balked, informing me that he was "really not a Marvel fan." Okay. So I went ahead and inked it anyway.

SpideyCat and the Chopper Cube: Marvel Samples Then and Now!

I started reading comics in earnest at the age of ten in the summer of 1972. The first comics I devoured were from the Marvel Comics Group with the cover date of September. Virtually the last comic book on the spinner rack at Howard's Drugs at Six Mile and Inkster Road in my neighborhood of Livonia, Michigan--with a Marvel banner that I hadn't read already--was Amazing Spider-Man #112, which I bought somewhat reluctantly. I don't know what it was that turned me off of Spider-Man; maybe it was the awful Ralph Bakshi Saturday morning cartoon of some years before, with the dreadful theme song that still haunts the current Marvel movies.

Scream Queen Studies and Pulp Pencil Sketches

Here is a slew of studies from recent weeks since the semester came to an end. First are several studies of Viola Conley, model and wife of pulp cover artist Hugh Joseph Ward, who collaborated with Viola on countless covers for Spicy Mystery and similar titles. Viola's features are reminiscent of Joan Cusack, and greatly expressive--largely grimacing in terror, and has a great body language. Ward's style is brushy and impressionistic--sketchy, almost watercolor, although he probably used oils. My studies--they would be "swipes" in another context--are attempts to capture some of those ephemeral qualities and, more importantly, to have those overtones seep into my natural drawing style and hopefully come out when I'm drawing from my imagination.

Viola Conley could rank as arguably the most prolifically-depicted pulp character in the history of magazines, and one of the more frequently portrayed American of the twentieth century, at least in paint by a single artist (Doc Savage and men's adventure magazine model Steve Holland might have more appearances, not only by James Bama but other artists). Mostly she's menaced by thugs, bad guys, space pirates, etc., but I thought it might be fun--for purposes of a few collector commissions--to have her play the role of Ann Darrow (immortalized by Fay Wray--the original scream queen). I don't quite get Viola's inimitable features, but I enjoy drawing her body language.

In a totally unrelated lark, I drew this pencil sketch of Veronica Hamel (Hill Street Blues), who was a longtime model for Virginia Slims cigarettes. One of her early ads have her in a female superhero getup, which suggested further adventures. I've tried to be true to the costume, and naturally I had to conflate the persona with her Hill Street co-star, Daniel J. Travanti.

Finally, I've been reading a good deal of Philip José Farmer, who virtually created a different fantastic world with almost each novel he wrote (as did many of his generation of sci-fi and fantasy scribes). One of his mid-sixties works, Dare, is a pretty uneven outing, but introduces a tantalizing character named R'li. Too bad further stories were never written--I think it would have been amazing. I'm not often inspired to draw renditions of literary characters, but I didn't like any of the various interpretations of R'li  that I've seen on various paperback editions--so I drew my own. Farmer doesn't describe her ears as pointy, but details such as body hair patterns are faithful, I think.

These interpretations are pretty earthy, but that's my sensibility. I've been reading a good deal of pulp prose lately--Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lester Dent (the principal author of Doc Savage as "Kenneth Robeson"), and James Blish (most famous for adapting Star Trek TV episodes into short-story anthologies in the 60s and 70s. There is something extremely regressive about most pulp adventure--characterization of females is mostly sparse--but there is also something terribly important about what it says of the American century in which it was created as a mere distraction--now we are distracted by entertainment that is far less substantive and in many ways even more socially regressive.

I have said elsewhere that the bankrupt discipline of art history has missed the boat on American illustration, opting instead to genuflect before the one-percent investor-friendly art world (replete with MeToo contemporary theorists in academia). Literary studies also has missed the boat on popular American fiction. These overlapping entertainments are more than "visual culture studies" and "popular culture"--they are important products of an era now vanished forever, as Philip José Farmer himself pointed out. If your object is to study the American psyche, this material deserves our scrutiny.

Read the Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series every week! New chapter every Friday!

Woonan the Barbarian! Summer 2019 Sketches and Commissions!

Here is a slew of some of the things I drew at this past week's Three Rivers Comic Con, kicking off the summer 2019 convention season! The warm-up began a week, earlier at Free Comic Book Day, with a caricature of me courtesy of Howard Bender (below; his contact info is on the image, if you want Howie to sketch at your event). Other examples includes Dejah Thoris for Eric Anderson, and some sweet Ms. Megaton Man sketches.

Read the Ms. Megaton Maxi-Series YA prose novel!

Flat-colored linework.

Here's the inked version, using Hunt #102 crowquill and India ink.

Woonan the Barbarian (why didn't I think of that years ago?) with Deja Vu-This for Dean Focareta.

Dejah Thoris of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series for Eric Anderson of Northeast Ohio (NEO) Comic Con.

The Human Meltdown encounter Ms. Megaton Man!

A laid-back view of Clarissa James, Ms. Megaton Man.

 

Ms. Megaton Man shows her smile!

Megaton Man for Mike Easton of The Impossible Family comic!

Caricature of Mega-Don Simpson by Howard Bender!

__________
All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures are ™ and © Don Simpson 2019, all rights reserved (unless otherwise noted).