further evidence that the love of my life and myself think alike...:)

Time cures all...sort of.

Recently went and looked at some of the old stuff i did at marvel, pulled the Saint Sinners and a few others.

A lot of that old stuff has been a sour point for me, lot of negative memories associated with the time as far as comics go. The experience of working at Marvel, as an admittedly naive idealist at 21-24, was quite depressing.

That made everything else a bit extreme, so if the coloring on a page was not quite right, or some other aspects of the books were not what i thought they should or could be, i hated them, outright. I have hated to look at those old books ever since, though i try once in a while.

About six months ago i looked at them and felt, less hate.

Again i dug them up this last week (talking about the CCA and some old incidents with editors had me looking at them to check my memory) and i found....i didn't hate them anymore. Which meant i could look at them and for the first time see the stuff in them that i liked.

lot of bits of stuff in there that I'm actually quite pleased with now. And there was some truly very decent coloring by Christie Scheele on Saint Sinner. I didn't like it at the time but i think i was over reacting to few glitches, the first two books being very dark/heavy/saturated, and there were so many other things going wrong with the book at the time, Elain's Scripts were being butchered, Mark the editor was a nightmare,....but on the whole now, i like it.
So for all the times i ungraciously bitched about the work Christie Scheele did on Saint Sinner, i apologize. me big jerk.

I still think 'Heroic Age' butchered the work i did on Dr. Strange 63, though it was admittedly not my best showing at all - done size as, just before i totally burnt out for a year. But all that green crap! And SO over saturated. Ack.

Dave Hornung was watching way to much Miami Vice when he colored 'HERO of CHOICE' in 'showcase '94', but it's grown on me. Aside from the crappy magic effect i cooked up, and the cookie cuter story (to much text, way to much, same can be said for all these books) I've come to like this one over all.

I still can't brag about this body of work (all my commercial work from 90 to 95), not my best at all, and not exactly great stories.
But on the whole, not as bad as i felt they were at all.

Page 24 done! Gota go back and finish off some from the middle but it feels good anyway, home stretch baby, less that a quarter to go.
Ending is good, I'm very happy with the over all mood of it, i wanted to avoid being trite, which seemed the biggest risk on this book. Think we pulled it off, though the readers will be the final judges of that.

On the table now is Muties #6, wrapping that up this week.


Next is the next Monthly Montreal Comix Jam, and the super-sized Jam zine that I'll be printing next week to launch at it, compiling all the pages from the last 4 comic jams here in lovely Montreal. Copies will be available at the Jam and from this site via paypal.

Also next week I'll be preparing to hang a largish show of my art, some paintings and some comic art, including prints of the B&W art from MUTIES, as well as a few other stories. There will also be some photographic work up, and a selection of sketches. All goes up the 5th of July @ Casa del Popolo

Soon as i get that done I'm off to work on the final compiling of PIN CITY #1, as well as finishing my own contributions to the book. very excited about that i am.

More soon.

Going to try to get something done for the benefit book being put together for Bill & Nadine Loebs by J.L.Roberson & Aaron Thacker.
For why there will be a benefit book for Bill & Nadine Loebs follow this link•••
Think I'm going to do a short by a.j.duric that grabbed my by the short and curlies when I read it.

I was about 10 years old, and we went to what was called the semi Annual Waifs and Foundlings.


A party by any other name. It was a tradition amongst my parents circle of friends, who were for the most part, either estranged from their families (“get out of my house you freak!”) or so far away from home as to make returning for holidays hard (“I’m a free spirit man! Just give me a stretch of road and a pair of wheels and i’m gone....”).

So several times a year, they would all gather at one of their homes, and insanity would ensue. On this particular occasion the excuse was Thanksgiving, or Halloween, or something. It was a very mild autumn, and the hosts were the parents of a girl, three years my elder, who i had a massive crush on.

Oh, and she was a redhead. A deep rich natural red like arterial blood, blue eyes, a perfect smile, stunning, curvy tall and stunning.

ahem

So anywho, being a couple of wild children out of control, and with parents on the sauce and a variety of other intoxicants, we were left to our own devices.

Messing around with dry ice in the upside-down plexiglas skylight full of cold water and bear, poking stuff in the bonfire in back behind the house, watching a whole lamb turn on a spit, following her older brother, a tall mohawk sporting punk rocker six years older than I, and watching him chop up watermelons gleefully with a machete. Generally running around and screaming like mad banshees - something she did particularly well.

Eventually we found the helium her dad had used to fill thousands of balloons that decorated the party. We started off filling a balloon and taking hits of it to mess with our voices, and eventually just took shots of helium off the tank itself, the giddy feeling was probably oxygen deprecation. After a while we staggered through the house like a couple of drunken Disney characters, imitating with little effort a drunken sailor impression one of my father’s old friends was doing quite well in the front room at the time.

I found myself bouncing down the hall like a ping pong ball towards a screen door, pushing the door open, veering towards the steps to sit down....and dirt!

I woke moments later light headed, that feeling you get when you stand up too fast...
...found myself face down in a flower patch by the front walk...about three feet from the steps of the house.

I got up, dusted myself off and checked for all my parts.

Nothing missing.

I walked back into the house and found myself faced with a wild head of Red. Did i mention it was curly and down to her waist? Her back was turned to me, she was backing towards me in a stumbly staggering way.

She ‘whoops’ed and the next thing i knew i had a face full of soft sweet smelling hair and a unconscious girl in my arms....

.... she woke up moments later like i did in the flowers, all fogy and fuzzy, and we learned nothing from our youthful folly at the time, in fact we went right back to the helium and got all light headed and giddy again, and to this day i have a massive sweet spot for red heads.

Originaly posted at 'the Kingdom' in 'the Swamp/Working under "the heavy thumb of the comics code"....

I shared a few of my stories of running afoul of the Comics Code, and the legacy it's existence has left at one publisher. Also to be found on the original message board, stories from Steve Bissette about his experiences on Swamp Thing. Steve was one of the first to work at a mainstream company but Not under the code since the 50's. Beging with SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #29 the rest of this series did not seek Code approval. This was seen by many as a signaling of the maturing of the comics industry, and paved the way for DC's "Vertigo" line and other adult-oriented comic books. Subsequent issues would have the words "Sophisticated Suspense" on the cover, to signify that the comic was targeted at more mature readers.

When i started doing work for Marvel in the early 90’s i was always chosen for ‘darker’ stories, so i kinda almost expected to have problems with the code, but i found the enforcement erratic at best at the time, vary arbitrary.

The one thing that i ran into frequently was the old ‘black blood’ clause, which i always found silly. I always thought that the black blood looked more ominous the red blood would have, i recall many other artists including my friend Bernard Mireault saying the same thing...but i guess they were more concerned with ‘lurid’ than ‘ominous’.

But really marvel at the time , or i suppose i should qualify - 'the editors at Marvel with whom i was working with at the time' were doing a bang up job of censoring themselves, frequently anticipating the problems that would get the code’s attention and getting rid of them before it was reviewed.

One panel that made me just laugh was a shot of the main character being pulled up through the ceiling in Saint Sinner 2, he was wearing a full body strait jacket in the previous scene but ‘mish mash’ (a rather swampy’ish character who’s body was made up of objects she absorbed from her surroundings) had freed him by absorbing the jacket, leaving him nude.

So in the panel in question you could see the protagonist's butt as he was pulled through a vortex...again not at all lurid a shot, mostly obscured by shadows, but still when the book was printed there were a pair of white BVDs on him that i didn’t draw....HA!

Also there were 3 versions of the cover for Saint Sinner book 1.
The first one that i wanted to use depicted the main character Philip Fetter lunging out at us, screaming. The demon and angel he was supposed to be possessed by appearing behind him under each arm. There was graphic blocking around his figure that completed the subliminal indication of a cross, with Phillip’s out stretched arms spread across in a familiar fashion.

It struck me as appropriate given the subject matter of the book, and it’s title, ‘Saint Sinner’.

It was nixed on grounds that it would upset christians and likely run afoul of the code...to which i remember stammering...”the book is called bloody SAINT SINNER, we’re depicting a demonic possession and a blasphemies characterization of an Angel....they are already going to hate this book! Why do we care?!”

It was only published as the cover to a Clive Barker zine that was featuring a profile of the ‘barkerverse’ (later the ‘Razorline’)

The redo i did was somewhat lack luster and i refused to do a third, so a composite of the two was cooked up by the bullpen and given one of those god awful foil jobbies.

phooy.

There were nemrous other ocasions where i was asked to make silly changes but those were the ones where the code was used as the excuse.

While they now do have a number of titles that are geared twards a slightly more mature croud, I can’t say it’s changed all that much at the big M, having recently been asked to change a scene that had some farm animals fornicating in the foreground ( a silly shot really, nothing gratuitous or obscene ).

this is the original,

and this is what we ended up with.


The code is gone (at marvel, a ratings system replaced it) but in it’s place are thousands of ‘concerned parents’ from who strongly worded letters do seem to hold sway with several centers of authority at the office, regardless if they truly represent the readers or not.

As justification for the change one such letter was offered up, having been received by email that very day...one of thousands they already get on a regular basis.

I tried to argue that they aren't likely to represent the market Marvel is read by dominantly ( in this case a self identified catholic mother who picked up the books in question - amazing spiderman - at a bizzare on free comics day to read with her children, and who was ‘shocked and dismayed’ to see spidy take the lords name in vain” - to which the editor told me he was sure that spidy did no such thing in the book in question...???!!! ) or at least that their entire line should not be geared to satisfy a single market.

I was generally agreed with!..but was told this is the way it is.

Not too sure what i think about that, but it leans heavily to ‘exasperated with humans”.

Also the key figures to who i found appeals were to be made, flatly refused to have any "pig sex" in their books! Imagine!

To marvels defense, the book was not under their mature readers banner that would allow for farmyard fornication (as are their 'Max' titles) but under the PG rating. They weren't supposed to be PG when they were conceived, but I'm told due to a 'slip up' in the office when the new rating's system was instituted, the Muties books were slated as PG along with the X titles they are most closely associated with. The PG rating pre assumes youths as fragile and innocent as 8 years of age will get their hands on the book. So NO PIG SEX KIDS!

Well i find the whole thing pretty silly. The book didn’t in this case suffer from the lack of pig sex, in fact I'm extremely proud of this one. But that there was even this much fuss at all over some dirtypigs, in a book that depicts the death of several innocent sheep is just goofy


Well back to the much more historically significant 'Saga of the Swamp thing'