DAVE SIMONS! TESS! FACEBOOK COMIC CON ROLLS ON! Tuesday’s Update
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009
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
• wikipedia.org entry for Dave Simons
Now here’s a little more about Dave as promised above from his recently added Wikipedia entry by .
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!
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.
Mark’s Remarks:
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.
