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.
The following week, Amazing Spider-Man #113 appeared, with the October, 1972 cover date. Reading those issues in quick succession got me hooked. Undoubtedly, it was the John Romita art; maybe it was the Gerry Conway (Law and Order) script; but in any event, Spidey immediately became my favorite character to read and to draw.

Also debuting that month was Marvel's Doc Savage, which introduced me to that classic pulp chatacter; I soon sought out the Bantam paperbacks, and read at least fifteen or twenty of them over the next few teenage years.

An unfinished sample, circa 2002, of two of my favorite Marvel characters I read thirty years earlier.

Another book that debuted in October was Beware! The Claws of the Cat (in the indicia, simply The Cat), with pencils by Marie Severin and overpowering inks by Wally Wood. Severin had been a major force in the first Marvel Comic I ever got my hands on, Not Brand Echh #12, which I glommed onto in a coverless version. More on that later.

So, Spidey and the Claws of the Cat (as I called her) were linked in my mind as a virgin comic book reader. I would be several years before I'd even attempt to draw a female character, but I drew Spidey--along with the FF and the core Avengers line-up, Luke Cage (Luke Cage, Hero for Hire was another debut in October, 1972), and a few other Marvel stalwarts--compulsively on the back of my math homework ditto sheets, during indoor recess and--when I could get away with it--during class time. And I usually got away with it a lot, mostly, I suspect, because teachers preferred me being quiet and not causing trouble.

I continued reading Marvels almost exclusively over the next five years, which means I watched Greer Nelson (the Claws of the Cat) turn into a were-tiger called Tigra, and 50s romance star Patsy Walker become one of George Perez's Avengers, the Hellcat. This progression seemed no more stupid, in my opinion at the time, than Luke Cage becoming Powerman, or Gwen Stacy returning as a clone. But no doubt it was idiotic storylines like that that soon turned me off of superheroes altogether. I had outgrown them, and by 1978 had turned to underground comix, Heavy Metal, and classic strip reprints like The Spirit. (I had also progressed from Doc Savage paperbacks to Philip Jose Farmer, whose A Feast Unknown mysteriously disappeared from my bedroom; by Born Again father having tossed it out. It didn't help; by then, I was seventeen, and I just went to Howard's Drugs and bought another copy, which I kept hidden above the ceiling time in our unfinished basement bathroom. I was also hiding copies of Cheri and Club magazine; I always had a raunchier sensibility than Playboy or even Penthouse.)

The Claws of the Cat (more likely, Hellcat) takes down Spidey! (Milo Manara, eat year heart out!)

Since I was still preparing for a career as a Marvel penciler in my teenage years, I continued to keep an eye on superhero comics, even though I was more likely to purchase Robert Crumb comix from the Classic Movie and Comics Center in Farmington, Michigan than crap like Marvel's aborted Howie Chaykin rush-job, Star Wars (one of the singular worse adaptations, at least until Rick Hoberg came on as inker late in the series).

I should have known about Spidey Super Stories #39 (March 1979), if for no other reason than both Spidey and the Cat appear (in the story, she has black hair like Greer Nelson, although they try to redden it to repurpose it as Patsy Walker, Hellcat--I suspect this was an inventory story that lay around in the bottom of some drawer for years before seeing print). But, it completely escaped me. No wonder; I had written off Spidey Super Stories from the outset as hacked-out juvenilia--even worse than the "serious" Marvel books, whose quality in the seventies went from bad to worse.

Now, I broke into comics in 1984 with Megaton Man #1, a parody of all those superhero cliches that I had outgrown, but whose hyper-drawing style still clung to me like an acrid stench. While I tried to purge myself of those stylistic excesses, it never escaped me that Marvel Comics had taught me to draw--How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way having been an object of study of mine since it came out in 1977, which led directly to immersion in Burne Hogarth's Dynamic Anatomy.

14" x 17" Bristol board, India ink with Hunt #102 "crowquill." This was about the time I was completely giving up on sable brushes that characterized most of eighties and nineties work.

While I couldn't take superheroes seriously any more, and had moved onto more serious comics such as I mentioned above, I never really hated superheroes, and always flirted with the mainstream. When I was hired by Mike Gold for DC's Wasteland series in the late eighties, I was also thrown a couple of the more campy Flash assignments.

Even though I had what I considered a "classic" mainstream superhero style--schooled as I was in John Romita, Gil Kane, John Buscema, Jack Kirby, and Wally Wood--I never made much headway in the mainstream at DC. Maybe, to stay with that metaphor, I was swimming against the current. Editors saw my recreations of the classic Silver Age style in the same light as they viewed Megaton Man--as sardonic satire.

Despite this, at comic book conventions I sold more Spider-Man sketches (which I generated on my own when business was slow, and I was tired of drawing Megaton Man), and to this day Spidey sketches are more prevalent on the internet, thanks to fan and collector postings, than any other character except my little ol' Man of Molecules.

Around 2002, may career as both an indy cartoonist and a self-publisher at a low ebb, I made a concerted effort to generate some Marvel samples and score some real freelance work. I drew samples of Spider-Man, the Avengers--even Marvel's mutant Exiles, and I'm no mutant fan. Needless to say, my old-school layouts and Romita-Kane-Buscema-Kirby-Wood (with Joe Sinnott) stylings got little more than derisive chuckles from editors like Tom DeFalco and Axel Alonso.

Spidey pencils on Strathmore 400 Drawing from June, 2019.

But one such set of samples--which I never finished and post here for the first time--featured two of the characters that I was introduced to in the summer of 1972. This three-page vignette features Spider-Man and --take your pick--The Cat, the Claws of the Cat, or Hellcat (I don't know which, although the fact that I left the hair open linework instead of black indicates I was respecting continuity and going with Patsy).

Flash forward to this year, 2019. In the meantime, that issue of Spidey Super Stories has become a cult fetish, because of the absurd foe Spidey and the Cat team up to fight--or more accurately, the conveyance which that foe uses to get around. Needless to say, "The Cat and the Cube" has become a whaddyacall intenet meme.

Spidey in pen and ink on Strathmore 400 Drawing, 2019.

Just a few weeks ago, a Marvel Entertainment (whither the Comics Group?) contacted me about contributing to a parody revival: a one-shot CRAZY! comic book. Among the ideas he suggested was the getaway vehicle from Spidey-Super Stories #39, which had become a viral Mattel Hot Wheel.

To make this too long story short, I have sold one pin-up (in my zany, hyper Megaton Man style) that has already been inked for CRAZY!, and am still in the midst of working back-and-forth with said editor on more ideas, including the aforementioned meme theme. Since I write, draw, letter, and ink, I have the bad habit of doing the whole thing and presenting pages as a fait accompli (which editors hate!); I also keep trying to push my "straight" superhero style (which my fans say they like--even art dealer George Hagenauer has said I "should have had a shot at working for Marvel"). But I think it's too retro for them--only Mike Allred is allowed to do retro, apparently.

The Cat, Hellcat, or--as my ten-year-old self prefers, the Claws of the Cat, pen and ink on Strathmore 400 Drawing, 2019. I think I learned how to draw girls!

So, I'm also posting a couple of snippets of the 2019 attempts. I'm assuming these are destined for one of my fan's original art collections--I've sold most of my failed Marvel and DC "straight" superhero samples over the years to folks who appreciate them--but we'll see. Stay tuned.
______________
If you liked reading this long-winded essay, maybe you'll enjoy reading my long-winded prose YA experiment: The Ms. Megaton Man Maxi-Series!