Welcome to Friday’s Mega Comics Group Updates!

Today we wanted to begin a series of blogs spotlighting the talents behind Mega Comics Group. So let’s begin, shall we? We shall!

Since he was 3 years old…
That’s how long Mark Poe has been drawing. He’s improved a little since those initial etchings which included an elephant and Flipper, the dolphin from the ’60’s TV show. Truthfully no one other than his mom could see the potential in those first offerings. But she could see it, maybe by the eye of faith more so than the accuracy of the work, and she encouraged him to keep going and keep improving. It was a struggle early on. He did not have anyone to teach him. His older brother, Jim was the same way. Mark would see drawings his brother did, 10 years his senior, and try to mimic his work. Jim had some comic books given to him by his cousins which he drew from but Mark doesn’t remember seeing much of these. Jim probably hid them from his much longer little brother for fear of them getting torn up.

So Mark had to draw on inspiration from everywhere else. Oddly enough it was TV shows, like the aforementioned Flipper as well as Tarzan and Batman which first helped get his creative juices flowing. He never much cared about school unless art instruction was offered, but in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s in the rural south, not a lot concerning art training was to be had in the school systems. Mark realized he had to find alternate sources to educate himself. Once he learned to read his appetite to read became insatiable. He haunted the library looking for books to instruct him on how to do better art. He gravitated toward cartooning inspired but the Saturday morning cartoons as well as his exposure to Walt Disney animation and the Sunday Funnies.

Then he discovered Saturday morning, and back in those days, Sunday morning cartoons. The Hanna Barbara shows like Johnny Quest, Mightor, Birdman and the Hurculoids fast became some of his favorites. Mark was more attracted to the hero stories than the funny animal and comedy cartoons. Then came the Fantastic Four and the Amazing Spider-Man animated cartoon shows! Mark had never seen the comic books. He did like the Sunday Funnies in the newspapers, especially the Phantom comic strip.

Mark also had a few Big Little Books and Little Golden Books which were heavily illustrated. So he became a fan through mostly those sources. He drew the characters as best he could. He was given blank memo pads from various relatives and he started drawing his own comic books on the note pads. He still had not had much exposure to comic books at that point.

He would draw sequences he saw on TV and the comic strips, then imagine his own. He drew what he saw at first but he was not satisfied with it at all. He knew he was not as good as his brother nor anywhere near as good as the comic strips in the newspapers. He then started tracing comic panels and covers until he stated to understand anatomy and how to put together figures and how perspective worked.

It was from these meager beginnings Mark fell in love with the quest for knowledge in improving his God given talent for art. He got his first comic books late in the ’60’s. That was when his interest in drawing really took off! He became an avid comic book collector as much as his allowance would allow. Comics cost 15 cents when he first started buying and in the ’70’s rapidly began to increase in price, first to 20 cents, then 25 and on and on. His allowance was not increasing along with comic book prices so it was hard to follow all his favorites.

But he got all he could. He remembers that as the prices went up the comic books availability went down. Drug stores and Mom & Pop shops stopped carrying comic books and some stopped carrying magazines all together. Mark continued to glean knowledge from his exposure to comic books through the years as he grew up and refined his cartoonist skills.

Not all art!
Meanwhile, life outside art went on. Mark finished high school and went to work. But don’t get the wrong idea, he did not go right into an art job. He paid his dues and worked a lot of non-art related jobs and did art in his spare time before getting to do art full time. Soon after he began working, he married his high school sweetheart, Rhonda Biddle. Some 5 years later Mark and Rhonda had their first child, a boy named Scott, to be followed by another son, Alex, several years after that. Before their first child came along Mark got his first big break in his chosen career!

Finally! An art job!
Mark learned that if you stick with something, you can gain enough skill to to get a job doing it full time. When he got his first job doing art it was a mind blower! The honeymoon did not last long when he found out there is actually work involved in this! Long hours, skill, occasional rejection, and the artist’s nightmare of DEADLINES! Even with reality settling in his passion for art did not wane and it did not stop when he punched out at the clock. He still drew at home. Which lead to the second part of his dream:

Becoming a cartoonist!
The Elf Trek parody comic book featured Mark’s first published comic art. Working as a Commercial Artist was only the first part of his dream, the other and main part was being a cartoonist. Not long after he got his first art job, through an odd chain of events, he got to draw cartoons for some independent comic book companies! At the time Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles came out and started an Independent Comic Book Boom! The Boom was short lived but lasted long enough for me to get my feet wet drawing comics. No, not the Turtles, even though he would have loved to have helped on that! These were other Independent Comics Companies beginning to pop up everywhere. One was Dimension Graphics headed up by Marcus Lusk who was about to do ElfTrek and needed a penciler. Unfortunately what goes up usually comes down and so the Independent Comics boom was short lived. When the boom went bust Mark found himself back doing art for t-shirts. Actually when he was working on the comics most of it was in his spare time while working full time as a commercial artist.

Then Mark went into business. Neither the screen printing nor the comic industry have ever been rock solid, stable, working career choices. Mark often had to commute and hour or more to the work location. Finally with the coming of the Information Age, specifically the Internet, he was ready to go out on his own. So a few years ago Mark went Freelance! Along the way he helped build several businesses. Mega Graphics LLC was the one he actually founded. Never let anyone tell you dreams can’t come true, Mark says his have been being fulfilled daily for years! Better yet, with his own business, he felt he would get to help others fulfill their dreams as well!

The Vision.
Now Mark has been involved in Commercial Art for over 30 years. Starting in 1985 at a fairly large T-Shirt Screen Printer, Mountain Graphics, Inc., he learned the ropes and contributed his knowledge of cartooning to the field of screen printed t-shirts and caps. Over the years he gained more knowledge to hone his skills doing graphic art doing projects for many companies. He has done layout and design of logos, flyers, letterheads, catalogs, banner ads, web sites, billboards, t-shirt designs, posters, comic books, and cartoons. For about 10 years he was freelancing, servicing over 100 accounts under the business name Mega Graphics, LLC. Then he went to work for Creative Printers, who was one of those accounts and eventually gave up almost all the freelance work . He then decided to focus my spare time business on creating vector clip art and comic book art.

Back to the drawing board!
That’s where Mark wants to be. After it’s all been said and done, he just wants to draw. Cartoon art is what he has done best. He loves doing single character illustrations of mascots and other subjects to sell as clip art. You see several examples of those here in this blog post. Recently Mark hooked up with the huge photo and clip art reseller Shutterstock.com. Mark says he has had sales with other clip art brokers but the results he has been getting at Shutterstock puts the rest to shame. So he is re-doubling his efforts to upload

a lot of his treasure trove of clip art he has done over the years to Shutterstock‘s website as well as produce some new art for them as well. That’s part of his goal.

The other part is to produce the comic book art and stories for MegaComicsGroup.com. At times it’s a balancing act to be sure. At times the clip art demands more time and at other times deadline for the comic books are more pressing. Whatever the results Mark will share it with us all here. There is far more to his story of how he came to this point in his career and as time allows we are sure he will do that too.

Mark’s Remarks:

Before MegaComicsGroup.com, I started my other website, ArtMarkings.com, back in 2006 as a showcase for the commercial art I’ve done for the past 30 plus years. Right now, I’m in the process of re-making the site, which is long over due. A lot has happened since I first put up ArtMarkings.com: Facebook and Twitter have come on the scene, the iPhone has changed not only the world of cell phones but computing as well. Ditto on the iPad. Computers are more than twice as fast and have twice as much storage. Storage is not done just on your hard drive anymore but on Cloud servers, flash drives, or numerous other options. TV has gone digital, HD and is gradually evolving into a hybrid of television and computer.  All this is just a mere drop in a very large bucket to illustrate how much has changed in 12 years.

This revamped site will not only show off some of the work I’ve done in my career but, unlike the old site, also be a blog for whatever happens to be on my mind on any given day. Most of it will be concerning art but since there is more to my life than drawing, I’ll probably veer off on a tangent now and then. I promise I’ll try to keep it interesting.

As I end this post I would just like to say “Thanks!” to all those who complimented the old site and the art I had featured there and the requests for freelance art. I don’t do “walk-in” freelance assignments anymore in order to concentrate more on the two most important areas of my work and long term obligations and my family.

I would also like to say “Thanks!” to all the MegaComicsGroup.com fans who have followed us the past 10 years. Yep, MCG will be celebrating the milestone in just a few months. So hang around for a while longer and see what we do next. You might be surprised, as much as we are! 😉

Onward! Mark

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Archives Spotlight

Archive’s Spotlight is designed to look at all which has come before and add new comments as well. This posting we are reviewing Project New Man 3 Page 14-16!

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Project: New Man #3 – Page 14-16– We were able to get more page changes related to the background and the use simulated  Duo-Shade for the backgrounds of Project: NewMan #3 this week than we did last week. We are posting a couple of samples here which showed a huge difference in the old and new versions. The originals were too dark and had other flaws as well.

Even though we are only posting two examples here in the ol’ blog, you can  see 3 pages have been updated as you go from page 14 to 15 to 16. We actually got page 17 done to but we’ll hold it off and include it in next weeks batch because we forgot to upload it!  (sigh) Oh well, more to come next week. As you compare the before and after you can see the 25 year old original art pages Duo-Shade tones had faded some and our scanner could not pick up everything as it was originally produced. Below and to the right you can see the cleaned up, restored art for page 15 of Project NewMan # 3. You can see a big difference. It may not be perfect but it is a lot better. Mark says this is about a 95% restoration to the originals. In some ways it’s even better. He also informed us the tones on the original Duo-Shade art boards did not develop as well as it should have when these were first produced.

It could have been some old developer fluid or maybe the art boards were old when purchased but some areas did not develop as clearly as should have. So in that way these are better than the originals.

Check back next week for more pages in PNM #3 will be updated in prepping these books for printing with Ka-Blam Comic Book Printing and digital sales at IndyPlanet as well as DriveThru Comics in the weeks to come.

Speaking of our digital editions at IndyPlanet and DriveThru Comics: Here’s what we have on sale right now. You can still download Project: NewMan #1 and Humants # 1 for absolutely FREE! Project: NewMan # 2 and Humants # 2 can be downloaded now, for immediate gratification, for a mere 99ç each! And if you want actual hard copy prints the Indyplanet will sale those to you for only $2.99 each!

So don’t wait, get you some Mega Comics Group / Legacy Comics goodness today! Check out the cover links to DriveThru Comics and Indy Planet.

CU Next Week!

Fair Use reference to intellectual property of other companies are intended for historical and informational accuracy only. Mega Comics Group™ or Mega Graphics, LLC™ does not represent or have any relationship to any other company or entity or their intellectual property unless otherwise clearly noted. Mega Tales™ and © 2010 Mega Graphics LLC, unless otherwise noted herein.  Project: New Man™ and  Humants™ and © 2010 Freazie White, Jr. D.B.A. Legacy Comics. Tess, the Living Tesseract™ and © Stephen Greg Legat and Mark Poe. All rights reserved. Mega Graphics LLC, licensor.