It's hard to keep a secret for months on end, but a couple of dozen of us involved with this spectacular project have done just that. But the wraps came off in an announcement yesterday afternoon:
JUNGLE
TALES OF TARZAN to be published by Sequential Pulp/Dark Horse Comics.
Based on the classic anthology by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Written by Martin Powell and illustrated by Daren Bader, Pablo
Marcos, Terry Beatty, Will Meugniot, Nik Poliwko, Antonio Romero
Olmedo, Mark Wheatley, Diana Leto, Steven E. Gordon, Lowell Isaac, Tom
Floyd and Jamie Chase.
Tarzan ™ ERB, Inc.
Can't tell you all how pleased I am to be involved with such a great book and so many talented creators. Each of the 12 Jungle Tales is to be illustrated by a different artist, and below is a sneak peek at the first page of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs story I'm adapting with that famous scribe, Martin Powell, who is also ramrodding the project for Sequential Pulp's publisher Michael Hudson.
(Art is Copyright Will Meugniot 2013)
This is the first time I've drawn Tarzan for publication in 28 years. The last time was in the mid-70s for ERB's European comics line. Below is a cover penciled by me with inks by my friend, the late, great, Dave Stevens.
I solemnly vow that there will be no fedora wearing, machine gun toting apes in this new, dead faithful adaptation!
30 years ago this month in February of 1983, The DNAgents
comic book, my co-creation with Mark Evanier, first hit the comics shops of
America. It was one of the first independent comics wholly owned by its
creators and one of the first successful superhero comic books not published by
Marvel or DC in decades. So here’s to you, kids! With pardonable pride, here’s
a gallery of images featuring Surge, Tank, Sham, Amber and fan fave Rainbow.
Above is the cover for issue #1. The day the book came out
we had a small signing at American Comics in Studio City. Mark and I were
there, as were my wife Jo and shop manager, Rob Gustaveson. In fact for the
first twenty minutes or so, we were the only ones there to commemorate the occasion,
but then the gang from Marvel Productions showed up. Stan Lee, Jerry Isenberg,
Don Jurwich, Larry Houston, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Parr, and Kent Butterworth
popped in, and suddenly the day started going better. After Stan, Jerry and Don
left, the rest of us hit Carney’s for celebratory chili dogs.
The cover above is from DNAgents #2. It's one of my favorites, particularly because it
reminds me a lot of one of my favorite super-teams from the 60s, The Metal Men.
Dick Giordano complimented Mark on our daring use of color
on issue #7’s cover. We had a little sales pop by being the only book on the
racks that month whose cover went green. The color was achieved through the tricky
use of surprints and red lined color holds. A lot of things were harder to pull
off in those pre-Photoshop days.
ABOVE: The final issue I did full pencils for was #14 with its
unofficial crossover with The Teen Titans.
I’m amazed by how quickly 30 years have come and gone, and
by how many people fondly remember the DNAgents.
The DNAgents are Copyright and TM Evanier and Meugniot 2013. The Masked Mayhem, related images and text are Copyright Will Meugniot 2013.
"How do you come up with this stuff?" I get asked that all the time, as do my creative fellows. One key to thinking outside the box was handed me by my mother while I was a small child. It's the game I'm sharing with you today: Squiggle. First, someone draws a squiggle on a piece of paper -- or in this case, a tablet:
Then, that person passes the squiggle to the next, who builds a drawing around it. For example, this one suggested a Johnny Hart style face to me at first glance:
But I could have just as well done any of these from the same squiggle:
So in a matter of moments, I got a go-go dancer, a turtle, an aviatrix and Batman all from the same squiggle. Not to mention the pleasure of reminiscing about many happy childhood evenings spent around the table with my mom, sister and brother.
Feel free to print out the initial squiggle and see what you can come up with. It's fun, free, creative, and starts you thinking!
All materials in this post are copyright Will Meugniot 2013.
Last time I shared art by me that was exclusively done for TV shows which never got made. This time I'm tossing in pieces from a couple of shows which did get made, but wound up different from the initial pitches.
Above: One of my pieces that sold Universal's Monster Force. It was even printed in some of the trade magazines, but the show changed direction after it was handed off to others.
Below: A development sketch for an early Tansformers: Cybertron meeting:
Below: Art from a show that didn't happen. For a while Saban was toying with doing an all original US material Sentai show.
Below: OY! It's Pirate Racers from a version of Speed Racer that died a slow death in development hell after a very long option.
Below: My favorite piece from that dinosaur pitch I shared yesterday.
Below: And finally, a piece from a show that got optioned, mainly to get it off the market to avoid competing with an in house development of the studio that acquired it. Yep, stuff like that happens.
More developments to come!
The Masked Mayhem logo and related text are Copyright Will Meugniot 2013. All other materials are owned by the evil empires which commissioned them.
In some ways, doing development art for the animation studios is one of the saddest jobs on Earth. You give a project your all and get emotionally invested with it, even though only a few pitches ever go as far as animation. The above art is from a show that got pitched to a network, who offered a mini-series of five episodes with the door open for a full 65 if the ratings warranted. However the studio for whom the pitch was done balked over the partial order, and the show never happened.
While I did a little presentation art for Filmation around 1980, I didn't get to do serious amounts of it until going to Marvel a year or so later. My first major (to me, at least) development was Iron Man as giant robot team, based on an idea Stan Lee and I co-created after trips to Japan. There's an image from it below:
We had interest from Bandai USA, but Marvel's toy guy was convinced giant robots were strictly a Japanese fad and wouldn't take off in the States. So this one never even got pitched out of house. Two years later, Transformers and Go-Bots proved that maven wrong.
Here're a few more images by me from shows that didn't happen:
Wish I could share all the stories around these, and maybe I will, another day.
The Masked Mayhem graphic and related text are copyright Will Meugniot 2013. All other images are copyrighted by their respective rights holders.
Looking at the two issues of Adventure Comics above, I wonder how many of you can imagine what a shock the 2 Cent price hike reflected in the November to December issue prices was to a kid's economy back in 1961. I suspect DC had an idea of the potential impact, since comics had largely been a dime since their inception back in the 1930s. Here's DC's explanation to their youthful readers as it appeared in their comics during the transition:
Here's a gallery of DC books making the price shift, usually with the issue following the November 1961 editions, though Batman made the jump in November, so maybe some other titles did as well.
So virtually all DC comics were 12 cents by January of 1962. However, Charlton held the 10 cent price point until March, as shown in the Gorgo covers below:
And more importantly for my story of how the two cent hike shifted my attention to the nascent Marvel comics, Atlas also held the line and didn't go up in price until March's books.
When the January books were unbundled at the local drugstore the DCs were all 12 cents, and with a quarter in my pocket, and a sales tax that tipped to 2 cents at the 24 cent range I found myself a penny short of the 26 needed to buy two of my 'old friends' at the comic rack. So I made some new fictional friends by replacing a DC buy with Fantastic Four #2!
...and once I'd read it, I had no problem with continuing with Marvel's
intriguingly different characters when the price of the book went up to
12 cents in March.
I wonder how many other comic book kids made the same call, and discovered the new world of comics opening up over at Atlas, all because of a two cent difference at a critical moment in the industry.
The Masked Mayhem character, logo and related text are copyright Will Meugniot 2013. The other stuff is all copyright by its rightful owners.
Have a look at the DC Comics house ads as featured in 1962's May and July issues of The Brave And The Bold, which reveal a company stepping into the superhero arena in a big way over the course of just two months!
Cave Carson, another of the DC non-super team creations is featured in BB #41 with some nice Toth pencils severely damaged by an inker who doesn't 'get' Alex's superb design sense. But it's the house ads we're talking about here, and they feature old guard hero Batman, DC's sci fi comics, and the other DC non-superhuman teams -- except for the last one, that is.
Business as usual here: Robots, aliens and more aliens. It's interesting that DC had so many features with skilled, but normal people working as teams rather than as superheroes in the early 60s. Besides the Challengers of the Unknown and Blackhawk, they had Rip Hunter, The Sea Devils, Cave Carson and the fondly remembered but never reprinted original Suicide Squad.
And while the soon to be Marvel comics was unleashing the Fantastic Four and Hulk, DC set loose Bat-Baby! But, in the same month, they also unveiled their most modern and exciting title in a long while:
As with a lot of kids who grew up with comics in the early 60s, this first Showcase appearance of The Metal Men would be my choice for the best single issue of a comic published by DC at the time. If you haven't read it already, Volume One of Showcase Presents Metal Men is highly recommended.
Now for a look at the superhero onslaught represented in the house ads of BB #42, starring Hawkman:
Not only is a superhero cover featured, but check out the inside front cover:
And being a Julie Schwartz edited issue, the two other color ads feature more superheroes from his stable:
So it's superheroes all the way, at least until the inside back cover. It shows how diverse the DC line remained despite their increasing focus on men in tights.
And as much as I loved their superheroes, I'd still get the odd issue of Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis or Sugar and Spike when I had an extra dime or two.
And speaking of Cave Carson, which we haven't for a couple of paragraphs, I always suspected someone at DC saw the movie Unknown World before creating Cave and crew:
The comics images and clips are copyright by their respective rights holders. The Masked Mayhem logo and text are copyright 2013 Will Meugniot.
