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!
