Following the previous post on the 20th anniversary of Club Comicana / Vamporama…
Well, I did finish Club Vamporama as a concept in 2021, by sending our heroes back to 1982. That is some 21 years before the eponymous “club” (owned by Bette Noir) even existed! But…
NOTE: After you’ve read all the posting below (and I hope you do!), please go look at the 2021 posting “The Last Club Vamporama”—I had sadly accidentally deleted the original version of this posting, rather than making it private, forcing me to recreate it—and it’d be really cool if you could leave some new feedback & comments there! Thanks.
While on the theme of 20th anniversaries… I did my first Club Comicana strip around October 2006. To celebrate, let’s have a bit of history and rare art!
That first strip was going to be dropped into my regular “Networks” column for Comics International #201—however, Dez abruptly sold the magazine, and I didn’t get along with the bumbling fool who was tasked with killing it off taking it over… so I didn’t continue working for the mag.
But in actual fact, the very first (unfinished) strip was started in the summer of 2006. And I recently realised, I had never posted it on here. So here it is…
Read More »Club Comicana-Vamporama at 20
A pile of Drew Friedman!
As much as I still love Drew Friedman’s artistry today—his painted work is fabulous—I do have a huge fondness for the crazy stippling he did in the earlier part of his career.
Read More »Drew Friedman
I mean, it’s not up to the standard of the three series of Daredevil that were on Netflix, c. 2015-18. The third season of that (actually a version of F Miller’s Born Again storyline) is about as good as live-action superhero material gets. Notwithstanding my reservations about superhero stuff which excludes kids… and this most certainly does, in all its incarnations… the Netflix show, but especially season three, was excellent.
Netflix DAREDEVIL. Who’d think that DD played by a Brit would be so good?
Born Again of course is full-on Disney/MCU/Kevin Feige territory. This left some people to dismiss it as foredoomed junk from the outset. Not entirely without reason, perhaps, but……
Read More »Daredevil: Born Again… is OK
For Steve’s birthday…
Of course, Hulk and Darkseid are my timeworn go-tos when doing sketches, so I get 0/10 for imagination…
Read More »Birthday Hulk Sketch
Follow-up to this post, as a bonus to go along with Bernard’s Jack Kirby portrait, I drew him some quick sketches of Darkseid & Hulk!
A commission for Bernard Brannigan. Am really happy with how this came out—and buyer is too!
Here’s an in-progress shot:
And here’s the finished article!
Read More »Jack Kirby Portrait
A very good day, today, as I caught up with old comics pal Paul Gravett for the first time in aeons.
After meeting up at New Street (sorry, Grand Central, the station’s been a New York Wannabe since 2015 now!!), we went to the new-ish Wetherspoons there for a long lunch. We had fish & chips, and I had two or three of those refillable coffees (Paul stuck with tea! Very English!).
This was a great opportunity to pose for an awkward selfie with me squinting at the camera screen…
Note my Darkseid badge! I brought Paul one too. After eating, I had a “commission” to do…
Read More »Paul Gravett’s Brum Visit
As many of you will know, comics legend Jack Kirby worked for the Ruby-Spears animation studio from 1980 to 1987. This commenced with production design for Steve Gerber’s Thundarr the Barbarian (1980-81), after initial design man Alex Toth left the project.
As well as generating original ideas such as Thundarr, R-S also dabbled in licensed properties—Kirby worked on conceptual art for possible comics-related shows involving Thor (1981), Wonder Woman and Hawkman (both 1983), amongst others. None of these went into production, alas. In 1988, just after Kirby left the studio, they did do a quite well-done Superman show, which sadly lasted only one season, but boasted Marv Wolfman as script editor and Gil Kane as production designer. Kirby may have worked on this if he’d stayed a while longer.
R-S also licensed a series of shows which used real-life celebrity likenesses—Mister T (1983-86), Rambo: The Force of Freedom and Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos (both 1986). Kirby did indeed draw production art on all three.
Sad to say, in the last couple of years he worked for R-S, Kirby’s work was in serious decline—several years of struggling with essential tremors had taken a heavy toll on his ability to work, and his art had become quite rudimentary, even crude at times. One reason Gil Kane was brought on board was to develop and refine Kirby’s designs, which frequently were deemed unsuitable at this point… Kane gave the ideas, as he put it himself, a better “representational” value.
Towards the end of Kirby’s R-S stint in 1987, it appears that they were trying to get an idea off the ground involving Arnold Schwarzenegger! It makes sense, after doing Rambo and Chuck Norris—Arnie was one of the biggest action guys of the era. The show never happened, but there’s some interesting Kirby art in support of it to peruse…
Let’s overlook the fact that Jack didn’t know how to spell Schwarzenegger…
What can we gather from this? Arnie is a good guy (natch), and he sports some interesting gadgets—his badge has a “time wheel” powered by his belt, which presumably enables him to teleport across space and time.
More Arnie art below!
Read More »Jack Kirby Draws Arnold Schwarzenegger
