Sunday, February 3, 2013

Isz Jam and 'Dr. Weird' pages



Here's a Dr. Strange Parody I drew years ago, which was later reprinted in I Before E collection.


...with a generous slathering of blacks.


notice how small and modestly sized my name was back then?


plus my nod to those little 'windows between dimensions' effects Ditko did so wonderfully.


Then while digging through the old stuff, here's something else I forgot all about... back before I broke into the big two... I was found any excuse to work an Isz into short story work I could find. I hit up a series of friends at the time to help draw an Isz story, you know... one guys draws a few pages, hands it to the next guy, make up up the plot based on the last guys part?

I lost steam and got distracted with other things. So it got filed away and forgotten. It's only half done... only up to page 15.  So i figured why not throw it up here?

My old friend Ty Templeton got the ball rolling...  Like the Dr. Weird story above, Ty edited and wrote quite a few small press stories i drew, and has done tons of work for nearly all the bigger publishers too. His book Stig's Inferno was one of my favs.


I'm afraid all I have is these faxes Ty sent me 20 years ago. Apologies if you'll go blind trying to read them. The other parts are easier - promise.



Next Isz three pager (actually 4) was Dave Garcia, another pal from my small press days. He and his wife did the comic Panda Khan which was pretty cool. Here's a cover Dave did i've always loved.


Here's what Dave came up with..





Now's a curious one.. I didn't know the third artists, so I'm guessing Dave knew him and got him to agree to do one? Turns out his name's John Patrick Morgan (or J.P. Morgan), another 80s artists who drew, among other things, a cool book I vaguely remember called Fission Chicken.



Sadly John passed away not long ago.  That's really a shame. So, hats off and a toast to the two pages John did for my isz jam story.




Next up was Tom Stazer who drew a space parody book I loved called 'Spaced'.  Another strip i loved of his was called 'Crazy Bob'. I even painted this back cover for one of his Spaced issues.



Tom's space ship in Spaced always looked like a hair dryer. I like drawing hair dryers for some reason. Uncle Freddy anyone?


Seems Tom handed it off to Mark Martin. I'm a huge fan of thus guy, he did a parody of Dark night called Gnatrat, but my fave was the hard to find book 20 Nude Dancers 20 Poster Book.  Very funny stuff if you can find it.



Here's what Mark added to the Isz saga..



Whoever drew this last two pages is a mystery. The only name i have written down is Don.



Maybe.. Don Simpson? Not sure just who drew these two pages, but here they are for what it's worth..

And with that, our story trails off.  Unfinished.  These hand 'round robbin' stories are hit and miss, and the plot always takes a beating.  Probably not worth publishing, but worth throwing up online. My apologies to all the artists here for taking... what was it? 20 years? 25? (before it seeing the light of day.)
Sheesh. Pretty tacky of me, but at least it's out there now.