Welcome to Tuesday’s Daily Mega Comics Group Updates!

Dave Simons is an inherently notable artist in comics history!  🙂 Dave Simons has been doing comics either inking or penciling or both for the better part of 4 decades! Most of his work has been at Marvel but he has also had some work for DC and some in the animation field as well. Dave has worked on one project or another for nearly every character in the Marvel Super-Hero Universe including Spider-man, Ghost Rider, and Conan to name a few. He has worked with Frank Miller, Rich Butler, Gene Colan and many other notable talents in comics. He has done a large body of work and done it very well. He may not be one of those names that is as recognizable as the ones above because he has always taken the back seat in assignments, being mainly an inker/embellisher and always more concerned with contributing to the team than in gaining notoriety for himself. More on his career in just a moment…

Recently Dave was diagnosed with cancer and the prognosis has not been good. Having worked all his life amassing a large archive of art as his resume but never having garnered a lot of headlines or  generated a lot of royalties. Now, he finds himself struggling to make ends meet with the added cost of medical bills along with the normal day to day bills. The comics community has been finding out little by little because Dave has been keeping it all to himself never to be one to ask for a handout. NHaving learned of the ordeal, Comics Fans and Professionals are rallying to his aid to help a guy who has always helped others, in his time of need.

Dave participated in the big Gala Kickoff Celebration launching the Facebook Comic Con. Several sites have been set up for him and in his honor. Also his own personal web site and his new Wikipedia entry. In addition there are some auctions of his work and other notables who have contributed works to raise money to help ease Dave’s financial burden! The art at the below and to the right is one such piece by Dave himself being auctioned on eBay.

• Facebook Comic Con | Dave Simons

• The Dave Simons Appreciation Society

• Inherently Notable – An Art Jam in Appreciation of Dave Simons

• www.dave-simons.com

• ebay.com- Help Dave Simons

• wikipedia.org entry for Dave Simons

Now here’s a little more about Dave as promised above from his recently added Wikipedia entry by Daniel Best.

Dave Simons is an American comic book writer and artist. Simons has worked in comics since the 1970s and is well known for his work on Conan, Ghost Rider, Howard the Duck, Dracula, Forgotten Realms and more recently Courage the Cowardly Dog. He has worked with some of the giants in the field such as John Buscema, Bob Budiansky and Gene Colan.

Early Years
Dave Simons grew up in New York and always wanted to be a comic book artist. “I always wanted to do comics since I was about eight years old,” Simons said, “so I started making a point of drawing something every day. I figured if I just kept doing that, then eventually I’d get better at it.” After a stint in the Coast Guard, and a chance series of meetings with Frank Robbins, Simons elected to undertake formal training to be an artist. As part of his education Simons attended the now legendary art workshops run by Marvel Comics artist John Buscema. It was while attending these classes that he became friends future comic book artists Ken Landgraf and Armando Gil. It was through Landgraf that Simons produced his first published work, which consisted of mainly commercial illustrations and the occasional soft-core pornographic comic book. Breaking away from Landgraf, Simons and Gil formed an alliance and friendship that continues to this day.

Marvel Career
Approaching then-Marvel editor Rick Marschall at a convention in the early 1980s, Simons was able to get his samples seen and assessed. At the time Marschall was overseeing the black and white magazine line for Marvel and Simons was duly assigned the duty of inking the first issue of the Howard the Duck magazine. After submitting the story Simons was assigned a fill-in Falcon story, which he inked with the assistance of Gil over Sal Buscemas pencils. This marked his first professional work for Marvel and in mainstream comic books.

Simons was then assigned both pencilling and inking jobs for Marvel. One of the artists who’s pencils he inked was Gene Colan. “Gene Colan was always my favorite penciler to work on,” says Simons today. “That was like a match made in heaven because a lot of people didn’t understand Gene’s shading. I thought ‘this is great, this is a great jumping on point if you’re gonna do black and white stuff’.” Simons attention to detail came into high demand in the 1980s and his inking credits include artists such as Keith Pollard, Ron Wilson, Frank Miller, John Buscema, Marc Silvestri, Greg LaRoque, John Romita Jr, Ed Hannigan, Walt Simsonson and more. Titles that featured his inking include Thor, The Thing, Marvel Premiere, Night Thrasher, Iron Man, King Conan, Dr Strange, Star Wars, Star Trek, Thundercats and others.

Simons’s tenure at Marvel wasn’t limited to inking. He proved himself to be a very capable penciler and his pencils and ink combination were featured in titles such as the Spectacular Spider-Man, Team America, What If, Marvel Comics Presents, Bizarre Adventures, Red Sonja, Web Of Spider-Man, King Conan. He also provided cover art to titles such as Power Man & Iron Fist, Ghost Rider, Darkhold, Machine Man, Kull The Conqueror, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two In One, Crystar, Moon Knight and many others. “Pencilling, if you’re doing it right,” said Simons, “is a much tougher gig than inking. Even though I usually liked to know what was going on, with inking you don’t necessarily have to be involved with the story. With pencilling you have to be intimately involved with the story because you’re the one who’s bringing the writers work and intentions across to the readers, as to what he’s trying to communicate there. You have to think of the drama, the camera angles, and the composition, make sure you leave room for the word balloons, all those sorts of things.”

Ghost Rider
Simons’s best known Marvel work was his run on the first series of Ghost Rider. His run on the title saw him first inking veteran artist Don Perlin before joining with Bob Budiansky to create one of the best remembered runs of the characters history. Budiansky and Simons worked with writers Roger Stern and J.M. DeMatteis. “The only speed bump we hit in this whole thing was when Simons, who of that team is the unsung hero, left,” Budiansky recalls. “He used to come to the office dressed in leather. I mean, this was not an act, he’d come dressed in one of these black leather, zipper jackets. I don’t know if he also wore leather pants. He might have worn them. But anyway, the point is, he knew how to ink leather, which was really important for Ghost Rider. So when he left the book we never really were able to replace that look that he gave the book. The rest of the team was all somewhat saddened by his departure.” Marvel attempted to duplicate the highly detailed and rendered look that Budiansky and Simons were able to give the character when the character was relaunched in the early 1990s but never quite succeeded.

DC Career
In the 1990s Simons left Marvel and crossed companies to DC. At DC he worked on titles such as Deathstroke The Terminator, Spelljammers, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, the latter he inked over Rags Morales’s pencils. “I liked the combination of me and Rags Morales,” says Simons, “He has that Frazetta thing going on and I was hip to that and tried to bring that out a lot.” Simons also worked on a number of cartoon based books during his time at DC and his work is featured in titles such as Cartoon Network Block Party. During this time he also illustrated Roger Rabbit at Disney.

Animation Career
In the late 1990s Simons left the comic book industry and moved into animation. As an artist he provided storyboards to such shows as Captain Planet, Exo-Squad Masters Of The Universe, Zula Patrol, Psi-Kix and Maya and Miguel. Recalls Simons, “The list of shows I’ve worked on is certainly longer than the list of comic books that I’ve worked on at this point.” Simons also directed the show Spy Dogs and worked again with Gil on this show, hiring him as a storyboard artist. Simons has the distinction of working on both an animated TV program and the comic book spin-off at the same time, this was when he worked on the animated show Courage The Cowardly Dog, which he subsequently drew the DC comic book of the same name.

Post Animation
Simons is known as a creator of characters. He has developed his own co-creation, Beastball Saga, with Sebastian Mondrone. He is also developing a new character, Donna Thyme, with writer Daniel Best.

Simons’s most recent work has been on the book Army Of Darkness, along with contributing art to various trading card sets issued by Rittenhouse. He has also contributed art to variant covers for series such as Red Sonja and the ‘100 Hulks’ project. Simons is also active with commissions.

Tomorrow we’ll have a Dave Simons Gallery. Now let’s finish up today with some Mega Comics!

Tess Cover Art Preview

Mega Tales # 1 is a couple of weeks from it’s web debut featuring Greg Legat’s character: Tess! That’s short for tesseract. The image you see to your left is a back cover Mark Poe did back in 1987.

If you don’t know what a tesseract is 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.

Below 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 undersatanding 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 named Nostradamus. The book was originally to be published by Dimension Graphics but unfortunately never saw print.

Greg Legat created and wrote Tess while Mark Poe, and J. Adam Walters did the art. The series for  the web will be in full color.

Any questions or comments? All are welcome.

Click the images to go to the site or for a larger image view.

CU2morrow!

Welcome to Monday’s Mega Comics Group Updates!

No, that’s not a Kirby Original Pencil Sketch. 🙂 We wish it was. This is a detail from the Dave Simons’ Tribute cover art Mark is doing as a commission for the folks over at the Facebook Comic Con. This is one of 3 cameo images on the cover which we showed a few days ago. A thumbnail sketch of the whole can be seen below in a previous post. The original sketch is one Jack Kirby did in 1975. Mark reported he had a blast recreating this from the scan of the original he had. “You get a new appreciation for the artist when you attempt to recreate their art line for line.” Mark has started the Gene Colan cameo and then will go on to the John Romita piece. He has a little of the large image of Dave penciled as well. He says he is trying to do this as much “old school” as possible since this represents Dave and the artists from the ’60’s and ’70’s. So it is being penciled on Bristol board, and then the inks will be done directly over the pencils with brushes and India ink. The logos and masthead will be done on computer but then printed out and pasted on for the finished old school look. We’ll keep scans of pencils and inks and do a color version in the computer also. Click on the image to see a larger version in a separate window. 😀

Remember the Atlas Comics titles from the mid ’70’s? Mega Comics Group certainly is not the first to be inspired by the ’60’s and ’70’s Marvel titles. One of the first, if not the first, was Atlas Comics which was around in 1974-75. This was the second company to be called Atlas. The first was a predecessor of Marvel back in the ’50’s. This Atlas, which is often referred to as Atlas/Seaboard so as not to confuse it with the elder Atlas and since Seaboard Periodicals was the parent company, was started by former Marvel publisher Martin Goodman. Mr Goodman was really ticked off at Marvel and Stan Lee, his nephew, in particular for ousting his son Chip Goodman from the Editor-in-Chief position he had been promised to retain after Martin sold Marvel to Cadence Industries. There seems to have been some valid reasons for Chip’s firing but Martin would not hear of it. He started Atlas Comics and made Chip the publisher, at least in title, to get back at Marvel. He was succeeding and Atlas was on it’s way to ousting Marvel from the position they had stolen away from DC just a couple years prior with a ingenious marketing ploy which Martin Goodman used to outmaneuver and finally outsell DC. At Atlas he had hired away a lot of Marvel‘s top talent and brought back legends like Steve Ditko and Wally Wood to super hero comics. he installed the first original art return and royalties program which later Marvel and DC would adapt.  However, as is the case all too often, when bosses try to micromanage the talent pool, they dry it up. Infighting, resignations by key personal as well as the inability to weather market storms put Atlas and Seaboard out of business after one year. Rather then gaining his much sought revenge on Marvel, Goodman merely proved that Stan Lee, with his ability as the go between Editor-in-Chief at Marvel between Publisher Martin Goodman and the talent pool was one of the biggest reasons for Marvel’s success and managing to hold onto most of it’s top talent, like Jack Kirby and Roy Thomas, through those crucial years of the ’60’s and ’70’s. It is noteworthy, however, that even Stan was unable to prevail and keep everyone happy which resulted in Marvel losing Steve Ditko and Wally Wood early on and later Jack Kirby. Read more about it at the Atlas Archives web site.

Friday will be the day for the next Tess page update. Yes, we will announce now that Friday will be Tess Day. It’s better all around if we just go ahead and target Friday’s as our new page release day of our Summer Schedule. But we’ll still do a Wednesday Blog update as well… if we have anything left to talk about. 😉 So be here Wednesday for a new Blog and then back Friday for page 20 of Mega Tales #1! Thanks for stopping by. 😀

Any questions or comments? All are welcome.

Check out Friday‘s posts for Mega Tales! CU Wednesday!

Welcome to Wednesday’s Mega Comics Group Updates!

Progress Report: Dave Simons’ Tribute  Art!  🙂 Mark Poe, publisher in training and part-time cartoonist, has been working, every chance he gets, on the  Dave Simons’ Tribute cover art commissioned by some of the folks over at the Facebook Comic Con. We showed you the thumbnail concept sketch he did a few days ago, and we have also pasted in below so you can compare it to the current piece. Mark reports he is in stage 2 of the process, penciling the image on Bristol board. He has gotten most of it, as the scan to the right shows, but still have a little more to complete on the top. He started with the  Jack Kirby piece and worked around. “Why?” we asked. He said the Kirby cameo was the most detailed so he wanted to get that one out of the way first. He said the Gene Colan and John Romita pieces were challenging just to match the style but Kirby’s background  was the hardest on detail of the 3. Mark will try to finish the pencils this week and start the inking and do the logos and lettering. Click on the image to see a larger image in a new window.  🙂

Here you see the original thumbnail of the art. You can click this image to see a bigger one and compare to the work in progress. The original thumbnail was not proportionally correct so the layout was adjusted for the full size penciled version. and below is the original cover Dave Simons did which this Tribute was inspired by  🙂

Mega Tales #1 Page 20 will here Friday. We hope you can join us. Thanks! 😀

Any questions or comments? All are welcome.

Check out Last Friday‘s post for Mega Tales! CU Friday!