| Mock Covers Dipping Into The Ol' Sketchbooks |
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| April 16tth, 2004 All artists have sketchbooks, and most of 'em have a stack a couple feet high, at least. Yup, me too. And in these sketchbooks you'll find all sorts of things. A lot of mine feature layouts for pages that eventually wound up, fully finished and print ready, on good ol' 2 ply bristol. I'd show you some examples except, well, most of 'em are done in pencil, and lightly at that. Besides, posting my preliminaries side by side with the finished product is doubtful to produce very many thrills for you poor viewers out there ("Look! Look! I had Brother Voodoo's arm hanging down by his side, and then changed things by having it recoil back slightly! Ooo! Now, let me explain my thinking behind this subtle yet intrinsically important adjustment..."). Of course, there are exceptions, such as instances where another artist worked off my fully inked breakdowns, but that's been a rarity in what we jokingly refer to as my career round about these parts... Of perhaps more interest--minimally, at least--would be some of the doodles featuring characters and concepts that never quite found their way out of these spiral bound warm-up journals and onto an actual printed page. Mostly, I indulged myself with aimless little spot illos, but for a brief period in early 1997, I attempted to be just a wee bit more ambitious with my sketchbook. Coming off several months of churning out some of my earliest Classic Cover Redo commissions, the pervasive early sixties absurdity found most glaringly on the covers of DC Comics--most specifically, natch, on Mort Weisinger's Superman family titles--had permeated my poor, beleaguered thought processes. So, instead of just jotting down a set of lines with no real plan beforehand, I decided, purely for my own amusement, to sketch out a series of mock situations echoing those long-gone wacky covers... Bear in mind, the whole idea of someday posting this stuff up on something as outrageously fantastical as the Internet was an undreamt of possibility even as recently as 1997. So be aware that these are NOT finished pieces, nor were they ever meant to be. In fact, one of the key points of the exercise was to pump these things out as quickly as possible (I'd guess a half hour would've been tops in the time department). As such, I'll caution you that, since they weren't actually pencilled, but merely blocked out hastily in lightly rendered lead, all the drawing was done in the inking stage, accounting for a decidedly loose quality that alternates between energetic and sloppy. You'll see more than your share of badly drawn hands--my eternal nemesis--in addition to other anatomy of a questionable nature throughout. But, I'd like to think, there's more good than bad here. Because, folks, if you wanna see pure unmitigated crap, well, I've got plenty of THAT available, too, y'know? But for now, let's just stay with the quote unquote good stuff, shall we?... So, I offer them up, mostly in the order in which they were drawn, replete with their hastily scrawled faux Ira Schnapp title blurbs, immortalized in my favored medium of choice, red pentel. Some directly mirror earlier Mort masterworks--such as this one--while a few stray off into nascent Marvel territory. Some are funnier than others--hey, the ideas generally received about the same degree of planning as the drawing did, please understand--but I'm hoping you'll be able to mine a few chuckles out've these heretofore hidden casually conceived cartoons! And if you like these, well, I just stumbled across a pile of really cleverly written grocery lists from the eighties that you're sure to eat up! "EAT UP" Ha! Get it? And that's only the BEGINNING--don't egg me on!... |
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