The Game of Life • Avengers: Infinity War Trailer #2 • PNM #3 Pages 22-23 Revised
Welcome to Friday’s Mega Comics Group Updates!
We have to keep it short and sweet this week due to the approaching, Alpha-Omega #200, dreaded, deadline doom! As an A-O Alum, Mark has been digging through old APAzine tribs putting together his trip for the 200th Issue. So of course all ye ol’ Mega Minons have pitched in and everything is on semi-hold until that task is complete. The deadline to contribute to A-O 200 is May 7th.
The Game of Life & the Avengers
In the summer of 1987 A-O # 15 was in the mail…
Billy Leavell was the outgoing Central Mailer and Steve Shipley had just started his term as CM with #13. We had been an APA for 2.5 years. Several members were chafing at the bit to do some actual comics! Billy came up with the idea of tag team writers and artists taking up where the previous team left off with each new chapter and take the story anywhere there imaginations would take them based only on what had gone before. Billy started it with the script, pencils and lettering for the first chapter which was 4 or 5 pages. Mark Poe was invited to ink those pages. He was working another idea for a strip when he got the pages from Billy to embellish. The story had similarities to the strip Mark wanted to do. He had two pages done and decided to make it the Prologue. He checked with Billy and it was agreed, so he ran that first installment of The Game of Life in A-O 15. It was just 2 pages. We have the scanned art pages here to share with you. Bear in mind these scans are from photo copies, not the original art, which Mark no longer has in his possession. So these are a little rougher than what we would like to share. We cleaned them up as much as possible.
This little 2 page prologue introduced a character Mark dubbed the Archangel. It was about 6 months BEFORE Marvel would revamp their character the avenging Angel from the X-Men into a different Archangel. This was not the first time a mainstream comics company would snap up a character name Mark or Freazie White, Jr. were using. Image Comics published a book entitled New Man with a character of the same name after Mark and Freazie began Project: NewMan. The same thing happened a few years later when DC introduced a character called Mageddon. It was like someone was reading our mail! Is it possible? Well, it could be, or it could be a coincidence. Things like that have happened in the comic book business before. Remember when Marvel introduced Man-Thing and DC brought out Swamp Thing at almost the same time? Anything is possible, but one thing is certain, Mark and Freazie created Archangel, NewMan and Mageddon FIRST. So there! 😉
Next week we’ll share that first chapter of The Game of Life with you. Also we’ll share the second chapter the week after that which Mark scripted, penciled and lettered. Steve Shipley supplied the inks on that chapter, but more on all that later.
Here’s the Avengers: Infinity War, YouTube trailer # 2!
Avengers: Infinity War from Marvel Studios and Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures starts today! It is the sequel to 2012’s Marvel’s The Avengers and 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron and the nineteenth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The cast includes Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Don Cheadle, Tom Holland, Chadwick Boseman, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Dave Bautista, Zoe Saldana, Josh Brolin, and Chris Pratt, reprising their roles from previous MCU films.
In Avengers: Infinity War, the Avengers join forces with the Guardians of the Galaxy to stop Thanos, who is trying to collect the Infinity Stones.
Above is the Avengers: Infinity War trailer # 2. We voted this one better than the first. Check it out!
Mark’s Remarks:
I’ve had a lot of fun the past month prepping my trib for the 200th Issue of the Amateur Press Association (APA) called Alpha-Omega. It’s hard to believe it’s been over 30 years since Freazie and I were bi-monthly contributors to A-O. As I wrote previously I started as a writer for A-O more so than an artist. I would type up chapters of my work and include a few illustrations to go along with it. Freazie joined up and read a couple of chapters of my story Living on the Razor’s Edge. Freazie asked if he could adapt my story to comics form. I said sure and even offered to ink it. I thought as a team we could probably pull it off and we did for several issues.
Razors Edge came before the Legacy Comics Universe. It was meant to be a more realistic take on the old super powered human concept we fondly refer to as the Super Hero. My main inspiration for the series was the Fantastic Four and The X-Men. I wanted to catch the family and action elements of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s FF and the teenage aspects of their X-Men. In the ’80’s Chris Clairmont and John Byrne was doing that with new variations of both of these titles, so I had that too for inspiration. I wanted to make it a step farther by borrowing from Lee’s idea for heroes WITHOUT spandex costumes but rather outfitted in regular street clothes like he and Jack did in FF #1-3 It was a concept I had worked on for several years before joining A-O. I first thought of it as a comic book, then as a comic strip and finally decided to write it out in prose form and publish it in A-O. Freazie would read my typed chapters and then condense them down to comic book pages. He would pencil the pages and letter in his dialogue, then when I go the penciled pages I would ink all of it including Freazie’s lettering. Neither of us were very good letterers. We later talked Billy Leavell into taking over in that department for us on our subsequent Small Press and Independent Comics projects. Billy was a top notch letterer, penciler, inker and scripter. He was very fast too.
Time marched on and for reasons I don’t recall right now, we decided on different characters for our first small press comic books and then the independent comics later. Freazie had characters he had created years before we worked together which evolved into the Humants. I had character I originally called Para-man which became NewMan. As the NewMan and the Humants universe grew together we brought Razor’s Edge into it as well. Their were sub-plots involving Senator Razor and the other characters but they never got fully introduced into either the Project: NewMan or the Humants titles. Who knows? After Humants #6 finally get’s put together later this year, maybe someday Razor’s Edge will return.
🙂
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 22-23!
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Project: New Man #3 – Page 22-23– Here we go again with yet two more pages of revised art. We continue to add simulated Duo-Shade tones to the black and white pages from Project: NewMan #3.
Pages 22 and 23 are showcased for this week. As you may recall, there was no background halftones originally on these pages by Chris Torres and Mark Poe which make up Chapter 7 of The Haunted Man storyline. This art was originally done on Bristol Board which has always been the chosen working surface for most comic book pencilers. Thanks to Photoshop we can simulate the shading which use to be done on the Duo-Shade illustration boards.
Click the before and after images here, to see larger views and compare the art.
When we dug out all this material several years ago to start this web site we just scanned and cleaned up the original inked pages and presented them as is. Chapter 7 had never had any halftones like we did on the previous chapters.
Back in the day we had two ways of adding halftones to the original art. We could use the Duo-Shade boards like we used in Chapters 1-6 or we could use full sheets of adhesive Zip-atone. Zip-atone and Letratone were two of the products available which did the same thing. This graphic design material consisted of thin plastic film with a slight adhesive over a backing sheet which was used to place a halftone dot screen across an area of a black and white illustration. The dot pattern came in a variety of gray-tone percentages and in different sizes of dots, measured as lines per inch. Some were straight percentage tones or lines. Some would be gradients and some special op-art. Some were pretty cool looking!
The way you used Zip-atone was to place it over your drawing, on a light table preferably, cut out the shape with an Exacto knife, carefully lift it, and place it over the drawing, then smooth it out. Another brand offered halftones which could be rubbed off onto the selected area. These, however were often messy and usually stuck to areas you didn’t want tones on.
Check back next week for more pages in PNM #3 as we continue updating these books for printing with Ka-Blam Comic Book Printing and digital sales at IndyPlanet as well as DriveThru Comics.
Remember, we have digital editions at IndyPlanet and DriveThru Comics 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! And we also have Mega Tales #1 featuring the debut of the other long ago project Mark and Greg Legat did called Tess, The Living Tesseract.
What are you waiting for? Go grab some Mega Comics Group / Legacy Comics right now! Check out the cover link to the left here which will take you to Indy Planet. Here’s the link if you had rather got to DriveThru Comics.
CU Next Week!
For those who don’t know what an APA is, 
Decker and Gafford were also founding members of the minicomics co-op the United Fanzine Organization. The difference in a co-op and an APA is that an APA is helmed by a central mailer, to whom the members send copies of their publications. The central mailer then compiles all the books into one large volume, which is then mailed out to the membership in “mailings” (called “bundles” by a few APAs). In a co-op, however, there is no central mailer; the members distribute their own works, and are linked by a group newsletter, a group symbol that appears on each member work, and a group checklist in every “member zine.”
The first European comics APA was called PAPA and launched by a group of comics fans in January 1978. Soon renamed BAPA (for “British APA”), it celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2003, but folded the following summer.
Since he was 3 years old…
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.
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.
Finally! An art job!
The Golden Age, the Silver Age, The Bronze Age and … If you have any knowledge of comic book history you know what those terms refer to . The Golden Age of Comics Books officially began in 1938, when Superman appeared in Action Comics # 1 and began monthly publication. During World War II, superheroes and funny animals were the most popular genres. In the 50’s when superheroes sales began to decline new genres were developed (i.e., western, romance, and science fiction) and reached an increasingly important readership. At the beginning of the 1950s, with the emergence of television, comic books sales began to decline. This event is key!
In 1956 began the Silver Age of Comic Books with the return of the preference for superheroes, such as Flash and Green Lantern by DC Comics. Meanwhile, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko brought us Marvel Comics! Marvel would become the leading publisher of comics in what would be known as the Bronze Age of Comic Books (from the early 1970s to 1985) during which the superhero stories lost most of their traditional representations of the concept of good verses evil opting instead for shades of gray and the birth of the anti-hero. The standards set by the Comics Code Authority were relaxed.
The dying newspapers, once considered a safe harbor for many cartoonists, were downsizing comics pages. The comic strip experienced a crisis more pronounced in the 2000’s and linked to that of the press as a whole, while at the same time a new American product, the webcomics, appeared.
In the second half of the 2000’s, webcomics became less financially sustainable due to the rise of social media and consumers’ disinterest in certain kinds of merchandise. However, crowdsourcing through Kickstarter and Patreon also became popular in this period, allowing readers to donate money to webcomic creators directly. The 2010’s also saw the rise of webtoons in South Korea, where the form has become very prominent. This decade has also seen an increasingly larger number of successful webcomics being adapted into animated series in China and Japan.
Digital Comics. With the growing use of smartphones, tablets, and desktop screen reading, major publishers begun releasing comics, graphic novels and Manga in digital formats.
ComiXology is a cloud-based digital comics platform that offers material from over 75 publishers and independent creators, which can be bought or downloaded for free.
Image Comics launched its ‘Image Digital Comics Store’ in 2013 which is a part of its company website. It got attention for selling comics digitally that are DRM-free, thereby allowing users to download their comics in PDF, EPUB, and the CBR or CBZ Comic Book Archive file formats to their various electronic devices. It also has exclusive digital releases on its website and offers 5-page previews of its comics online. Image Comics was the first big publisher to offer DRM-free digital comics in the U.S., stating that it believes that consumers should be able to own what they have bought in the case of a platform having major technical problems or leaving the market altogether. It also stated that it does not see infringement as a big problem as most consumers will buy comics that are of high quality.
Since 2012, DC Comics has offered to sell its comics through all three major E-book stores: Amazon Kindle Store, iBookstore and Nook Store, as well as through the site www.readdcentertainment.com and through comiXology. DC Comics was the first to offer readers multiple formats to download and digital issues releases on the same day as their printed counterparts.
The website Humble Bundle was originally created in 2010 for selling time-limited pay-what-you-want indie game bundles. Since 2012 it has been putting up pay-what-your-want book bundles, which now and then featured comics. The first fully dedicated comic bundle was in April 2014, hosting material from Image Comics. The Humble Comic Bundles are digital rights management-free and support charities. The website has hosted comic bundles from some publisher such as Dark Horse Comics, Top Cow, Oni Press, Boom! Studios and Valiant Comics, among others. The idea behind the bundles from publisher standpoint is to try to find new audiences for their products at heavily discounted prices.
In 1993 Image Comics brought us 1963! 25 years ago Alan Moore wrote a 6 issue mini-series, with art by Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, and Jim Valentino. Image Comics published the series which was intended to be their Silver Age heritage. You may recall Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino and Rob Liefeld left Marvel Comics in 1992 and began Image Comics. They had several successful titles including Youngblood, WILDcats, Savage Dragon, Spawn, Cyberforce and Shadowhawk. Alan Moore and his group of artists were to do a half tribute, half parody of Marvel’s silver age titles as the backstory for the Image Comics Universe. The six issue homage to the Marvel Age of Comics even featured spoof advertisements on the rear covers and throughout the books. Moore came up with his own Stan Lee style clichés and included a fictional “Bullpen”of himself and the artists as the “Sixty-Three Sweatshop.” They were “Affable Al,” “Sturdy Steve,” “Jaunty John,” “Roarin’ Rick” and so on. The stories were true to the flavor of the early Marvel comics and a respectable homage. The parody was in the text pieces and fictional letter columns which contained many inside jokes about the business practices of 1960s comics publishers. “Affable Al” was the lovable tyrant who claims credit for his employees’ creations modeled mainly after the reputation of Stan Lee but with a tip of the “Sizzling’ Six Three Sombrero” to some of DC’s Editors as well. Moore takes a little jab at Stan Lee‘s book Origins of Marvel Comics when he recommends that readers rush out and buy his new book How I Created Everything All By Myself and Why I Am Great. 😉
No Closure. The series was very popular and fans were clamoring for more but due to several behind the scenes factors it was never finished. Originally, the limited series was supposed to be followed by an 80-page annual, illustrated by Jim Lee, in which the 1963 characters would find themselves hurtled thirty years into their future to 1993. There they would meet the aforementioned 1993 Image Comics characters. With the series as it would have concluded, Moore was making commentary on how Marvel Comics innovations of more realism in their stories in the ’60’s which inspired creators to keep pushing the envelope with ever more “mature” and “grim and gritty” style of storytelling in comics leading into the ’90’s. Moore has made it known in numerous interviews, even regretfully so, that he felt his own work, Watchmen, is at least partially responsible for that development.
The Missing Link. Moore was almost halfway done writing the script for the annual which was to be the finale and tie up all the loose ends when news reached him that Jim Lee was taking a year-long sabbatical. He would still be doing publisher duties and some art but not be doing any sequential comic book art. Moore shelved the script, and after that year had passed, he felt so many things had changed there was no need to revive it. Rob Liefeld had left Image, which meant that some of his characters could not be used. As a result Jim Lee had more work than he could get done, a lot of which was executive tasks related to being a publisher, so his art time was being limited. The bloom was off the rose. The novelty of Image Comics had faded and fans began to look at them as just another publisher. Comic book characters and story interests were changing. Superhero comics had begun to become less gritty, a little less dark and more polished but also more creators were doing retro titles. The Animated Adventures of Batman was inspiring a whole new genre not only in animation but in the comics. By this time Moore stated that his interest in writing superheroes had waned.
Falling Out. In 2007, Erik Larsen was asked about the status of the project, and explained “Alan had a falling out with one of the creators on the 1963 project and he did not want to re-open those wounds. That ship may have sailed, sorry to say.” Moore has publicly expressed his disagreement with Jim Lee for selling Wildstorm Comics, which not only owned all of Lee’s WILDcat characters but also owned Moore’s America’s Best Comics line, to DC Comics. Moore had sworn he would never work for DC again. It is unconfirmed whether this is what Larsen was referring to or if he may be, more likely referencing the fact that Moore had cut ties with Steve Bissette due to personal issues.
Business Politics. In a later interview Bissette explained problems might have started earlier when the 1963 creators became entangled in the internal politics at Image Comics. He explained that “My perception of events, then and now, is that we did the 1963 series under the invite and umbrella of Image founding co-partner Jim Valentino,” however, “Rick Veitch and I found ourselves caught in the crossfire between the Image partners’ pissing contests.” These partners “quickly took the initiation of the 1963 project as an open door to working with Alan on their respective projects. Again, we didn’t realize at the time this also was tied up with their competitive natures: that is, it was Jim Valentino’s coup that he got Alan on board via 1963, and the other Image partners wanted a piece of that action, which would also trump Jim Valentino‘s initial coup.”
Related Projects? The comics also contained advertisements for 1963 1/2, which never surfaced either. This was a separate (unrealised) comics project created by Alex Cox and Paul Mavrides, which was previewed in a 2-page sequence in the final issue of 1963. It was not directly associated with Image’s 1963 and was also advertised in unrelated publications, e.g. Science Fiction Eye.
Bissette has revealed that he and Veitch had been working throughout 2009 to produce a “bare-bones hardcover reprint” of 1963 at Dynamite Entertainment but the plan fell through in January 2010. However, he did reveal that there was a “1998 legal agreement signed by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch and myself dividing up our creative properties” that left Bisette with “N-Man, the Fury, the Hypernaut and Commander Solo & Her Screamin’ Skydogs” who, he thought, “fit nicely with a bevy of my own characters and concepts I’ve never had homes for: Curtis Slarch, Lo!, ‘The Big Dig,’ and much, much more you’ve never heard of or seen because I could never interest a publisher in those projects.” Together they formed “my own invented comics universe — the Naut Comics universe” which became the core of his revival of the 1963 characters he owned, to be published in late 2010 in Tales of the Uncanny – N-Man & Friends: A Naut Comics History, Volume 1. (Editor’s note: From all our research, to our knowledge, this last mentioned book was never published.)
1963 Issue One – introduced Mystery Incorporated, a Fantastic Four surrogate featuring Crystal Man (based on Mr Fantastic), Neon Queen (based on Invisible Woman), Kid Dynamo (based on Human Torch) and The Planet (based on The Thing).
1963 Issue Two – No-one Escapes the Fury, featured The Fury, based on Spider-Man with elements taken from Daredevil, as well as Sky Solo, Lady of L.A.S.E.R., a female version of Nick Fury, agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.., and mentions a character called “King Zero“, who appears to be a Namor parody.
1963 Issue Three- an anthology comic called Tales of the Uncanny, featured USA, Ultimate Special Agent based on Captain America, and Hypernaut, who was based on Iron Man, with elements taken from Silver Surfer, Green Lantern, Arnim Zola (in appearance), and Swamp Thing. (The name Hypernaut is possibly a twist on “Supernaut“, a song by Black Sabbath, whose hits include the song “Iron Man.”)
1963 Issue Four- another anthology comic called Tales From Beyond, introduces readers to the Unbelievable N-Man, based on The Incredible Hulk, and Johnny Beyond, a beatnik version of Doctor Strange.
1963 Issue Five- Horus, Lord of Light, which appropriates Ancient Egyptian mythology as background for a modern era superhero in the same way that The Mighty Thor appropriated Norse Mythology.
1963 Issue Six- told the story of the Tomorrow Syndicate, based on the Avengers. This comic brought back Horus, Lord of Light, Hypernaut, N-Man, and USA, and also introduced Infra-Man, based on Henry Pym, and Infra-Girl, based on Janet Van Dyne.
1963 actually came out as Legacy Comics was about to go on hiatus. 1963 was inspired mainly by Marvel Comics, obviously, but also contained borrowed elements and concepts from several Silver Age and even Golden Age comics. A lot of titles can make this claim including Legacy Comics, but 1963 was the first to fully capture and distill the spirit of Marvel Comics from the early ’60’s so totally and accurately. Alan Moore is probably one of the few writers in the comics industry who could pull this off so credibly. Moore and his Sizzlin’ Sixty-Three Sweatshop did it with near perfection.
This 6 issue mini-series was possibly my favorite collected comics from the 1990’s. I’ve read and re-read these issues many times. I can’t help but to marvel, pun intended, at the genius of these creative talents and how they so closely mimicked everything about the Marvel Age of Comics and yet had fresh takes and original ideas on these old concepts.
