The Mega Comics Group Daily Blog is the News Information Publication for Mega Comics Group and it’s licensors as well as the Comics and Web Comics Industry at large.

You’ll also find, from time to time, current events news and commentary on sports, politics, music, movies, TV, pop culture in general or just about anything and everything that pops into our knobby little  heads.

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My name is Mark Poe, I’m a Professional Graphic Artist and have been for more than 20 years. I’m also a cartoonist, a writer and on two occasions, this being the second, I find myself being a Publisher. Now, don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not just adding job titles to boost my ego. No, I had rather do art and to be even more specific, I’d rather just plot and pencil comics. Unfortunately, that has not been my choice it seems. I’ve found myself HAVING to do more than I want to, if for no other reason than, no one else seems inclined to do it. Actually there is a host of rationale, which I may delve into sometime later. At least no one else seems to be doing it as I would want it done if I were the customer, which I have been. So I’m trying to do comics that I myself want to read not just something to fill pages in order to have a product to attract advertising revenue, movie or TV deals.

What MCG Is All About

Today I want to clue you in a little about what we are doing here at Mega Comics Group. I and many of the creators whose work we present here on our web sites, grew up in the ’60’s and ’70’s during the Silver Age and Marvel Age. We were inspired and influenced not only by the great comics produced in that era but by the men and women who produced them. We were not only fans of the characters, titles and stories but of the writers and cartoonists who put these tales together.

This was back in the early days of fandom, we did not have all the great fanzines, books, and site interviewing the cartoonists and writers like we do today so we had to glean what information we could from every source we could scrounge up!

Stan Lee at Marvel was the best about actually putting credits on the stories so we could find out who did what. This was rare prior to the Marvel Age. Stan also had articles and the famous Bullpen Bulletins with tidbits of info about our favorite artists and writers. So we found out as much as we could and how they did what they did.

In this day of the Information Age where we have access to all kinds of info at our fingertips it’s an amazing contradiction that it’s said we only have 10 minute Attention Spans! That really just doesn’t add up. They think we actually don’t read much and our attention can only be held by dazzling special effects or controversial material. Nothing wrong with special effects, we love ‘em, but that way of thinking of your audience is condescending to say the least!

For example look at the ads we see on TV today. Certain fast food chains and breweries have some of the most condescending ads out today. There ads have little to do with their products and they seem to be saying “C’mon, sucker! Just give me your money!” What ever happened to promoting value offered for a product? The real insult is the guys and gals who put those ads together are pushing them toward 18 year olds who they know have lots of disposable cash and think are such dull witted buffoons they can easily be relieved of that extra money! What an insult! But that’s the premise they base their ad campaigns on and they admit it.

I believe, as do my cohorts, this is just not so. We believe the average comics reader is intelligent and has a Great Attention Span! We don’t try to lure you in with bait, but we honestly believe we have something to offer which you will enjoy. So we do our best to present stories that are not just flash in the pan, instant gratification, but that will inspire you to think and dig deeper.

Also we want to inspire you! Everyone faces tough times and there are those who quit and give up, but there are others who keep going no matter what. Some have had everything possible go against them and yet fight forward. Most of this MCG crew have had that experience or know of someone who did! So we want to give you stories and art that will inspire you.

MCG has started out with tales from our early days of publishing mostly for Legacy Comics and Dimension Graphics. Using that as a good foundation we want to take our forthcoming new stories to the next level using today’s technology and techniques.

In addition to all that we will report to you on other web comics we come across that we enjoy and that we think you will as well.

A Little History

The images you see above are from 1986 for the title ElfTrek, a two issue mini- series I did with Marcus Lusk and Greg Legat at Marcus’s Dimension Graphics. This was during the Black & White Boom brought on by Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles initial success. Marcus had already had success with his one-shot Secret Doors. Both of those titles sold several thousand copies before the Black & White Boom went bust. I have a lot of fund memories from doing these two issues and I just got permission from both Marcus and Greg to post those two issues on MegaComicsGroup.com. That’s one for the forth coming Mega Tales!

The image you see to your right is a cover I did back in 1987 for a title by the name of Tess, which is short for tesseract. If you don’t know what a tesseract is well, you aren’t alone, neither do I! Actually Wikipedia defines it as:

In four dimensional geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube, which is in turn the three dimensional analog of the square.

To the left is another artifact from Wikipedia, a neat little gif animation released into the public domain by its author, Jason Hise which gives us a little better understanding of the concept…I think.

Anyway, Tess is a young lady who is a living tesseract. She comes from another dimension and in our dimension she can teleport herself or just about anything else just about any where. She manifests the power in a number of ways other than teleportation and she has a cute little 4th dimensional dog with a very high I.Q. named Nostradamus. The book was originally to be published by Dimension Graphics but unfortunately never saw print. Soon it will make it’s debut in Mega Tales. Greg Legat created and wrote Tess while I and J. Adam Walters did the art

Then there was Legacy Comics which was my first experience as Publisher.

Freazie White, Jr. (pronounced Fray-zee) and I established Legacy Comics back in the early 90’s. Freazie and I met years before as members of an Amateur Press Association (APA) called Alpha-Omega. Freazie read one of my submissions titled Razor’s Edge, a synopsis for a new book I was working on, and maybe even the first chapter, I don’t recall right now. Freazie loved it and called me up. We hit it off and began working together on Razor’s Edge. Freazie was penciling and rewriting it to fit the comic book format. I inked his work and we began submitting the pages to Alpha-Omega. These were fun days and we learned a lot. From there we started publishing Small Press comics under the name of Magi Graphics. I’m a little hazy on the details now, Freazie may have to correct me in his blog if he recalls, this was back in the mid to late 80’s. I think Freazie had previously published Capt. Testament and we revived that title which grew into The Humants (hu-mants). We worked on those characters in the small press until about 1991, then we began planning to move into the Independent Comics market.

Late in 1990 Freazie and I published Project: New Man under the Legacy Comics banner. We didn’t even sell a quarter of what we expected based n my experience with Dimension. We were not discouraged but we retooled our plans on our next book. Instead of 2 titles we would combine Project: New Man in our planned titles of The Humants. The first issue of The Humants was a whopping 68 pages! We saved on printing costs but again, as with most independents after the Black & White Boom, orders were low. Still plodding on and doing everything we could to get some exposure we finished and released The Humants #2 which also continued the Project: New Man story but we cut our pages down to 48. In the summer of 1991 we made an 18 stop Comics Convention Tour all over the eastern U.S. from New York to Ohio to Georgia and lots of states in between. We had a great time and met a lot of wonderful fans, convention promoters, retailers and talent both established pros and beginners.

We were beginning to build a small fan base but the fans were having trouble getting copies of our books. We learned that retailers, after the Black & White Boom, would not take a chance on unknown titles and this trend has continued and even gotten worse until the present. I don’t blame them really, they lost a lot of profit on speculating on independents. Many told us they did not have time to read a copy of each book that was solicited so it was a gamble to order most independents unless there was something like established talent they could use as a selling point. Actually even established talent has not always been successful with distribution so at least we had good company even if misery doesn’t love company. We tried to come up with a way to entice the retailers with freebies, posters and other stimulus packages. Nothing seemed to work. Out of money and with nary a profit in sight we had to shut down our operation. It was one of the toughest decisions of our lives. We had most of Humants #3, ready to go and 4 & 5 were already in various stages.

After Legacy Comics?

After Legacy closed up shop Freazie opened up his own comics shop, Collectors Mania. He built that up then sold that first shop and started over. Now he has about a gazillion comics and he sells a lot on eBay and off his web site www.comicattic.com.

I went back to doing commercial art for various businesses and eventually ended up going out on my own with a Graphic Art studio to do freelance work for my own clients. My web sites are www.megagraphicart.com and www.artmarkings.com.

All this time both Freazie and I have kept note books and making plans that maybe someday we could get back into doing comics. Now with comics moving to the web as I detailed in my initial blog, now we begin. Who knows where we’ll go from here?

We have repackaged the two titles to fit more into their original intended formats and published them on their own web comics site complete with archives. Soon we’ll do some new material for these titles. 16 years after Legacy Comics closed it’s doors we’re back at it! This time under the label of Mega Comics Group the publishing arm of Mega Graphics, LLC.

We hope you will have as much fun reading these tales as we have putting it altogether. Let us know what you think.

Thanks,
Mark
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Mark Poe, Publisher
Mega Comics Group
www.megacomicsgroup.com

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The Mega Comics Group Daily Blog is published by Mega Comics Group, P.O. Box 1455, Albertville, AL 35950. Mega Comics Group, Mega Tales, Eagle Ranger, The Quantum Mechanics, Mega Mascots, this site and some content copyright © 2008 by Mega Graphics LLC. Humants, The Khosmotic Conjuction, The Khosmotic Conjuction:2012 A.D. Pardigm Shift, Capt. Testament, New Man, & Project: New Man (including all prominent characters featured in this issue & the distinctive likenesses thereof) are a trademark of and copyright © 2008 by Legacy Comics and Freazie White, Jr. Contact: Comicsattic.com, 23712 Harper Avenue, Saint Clair Shores, MI 48080. Other content copyright by their respective owners. All rights reserved. No reproduction of this work or any part of this work may be made by any means or method, without written permission of the publisher. Any similarity between any names, characters, or persons in this publication and those of any existing persons is not intended and any similarity which may exist is purely coincidental.