I always loved the scenes where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby had The Thing of the Fantastic Four entertaining some kids on one of his leisure outings in New York, which was what inspired this little exchange.

Running a bit behind so I will save comments for tomorrow.

My artwork at this point was influenced mostly by Jack Kirby and John Byrne . Byrne was always imitating certain aspects of Kirby’s work so the two influences complimented each other. Kirby influenced my layout and dynamic sense in the penciling. I always tried to get the most action packed pencils I could or in the case of quite scenes, such as this one, the most interesting angles in telling the story. Telling the story with pictures was always Jack Kirby’s priority!

In finishing the pencils, I was trying to use Byrne’s inking style along with a good dose of Terry Austin and some Joe Sinnott. I like to keep the art clean with a good balance of contrast and detail.

Okay, at last it can be revealed. I admit it, Bearcat was inspired by… Felix the Cat!

Not really! Just teasing you! He was really inspired by all those cool characters like the Sandman, Guardian and Manhunter by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby from the 40′s. But he does have a pretty cool Bag of Tricks, eh? Just like Felix, eccept a little more high tech

The Adventures Continue… This inside back cover gives more insght into where we were back in 1991.

Mark’s Remarks: Still very green in the business, we canceled Project: New Man™ #2 and rescheduled Humants #1 as well as increased it’s size to accomodate both the Humants story and the second story of Project: New Man™.

This did not endear us to the distributors as we and many other independents were to find out. Canceling and rescheduling was a mistake which played a key role in Distributors further cutting back promoting Independents. At the time we felt we had no choice because of the low order numbers for P:NM #1. We had little operating capital and a double size single issue saved us a lot of money at the printers.

In the long run it did not matter anyway, the so called Direct Market became a bigger joke than the old Newstand Market. Even for the bigger companies it did not work all the time. If you ever wondered why a title by a giant in the industry like Jack Kirby or Neal Adams got canceled it’s real simple, LIMITED OR NO DISTRIBUTION. That’s right, the books never made it to a lot of stands and did not get into the hands of the fans. It still happens today. The World Wide Web is a much better Direct Market for comic books.

Any questions or comments? All are welcome.

The Adventures Continue… This inside back cover gives more insght into where we were back in 1991. Still very green in the business, we canceled Project: New Man #2 and rescheduled Humants #1 as well as increased it’s size to accomidate both the Humants story and the second story of Project: New Man.

This did not endear us to the distributors as we and many other independents were to find out. Canceling and rescheduling was a mistake which played a key role in Distributors further cutting back promoting Independents. At the time we felt we had no choice because of the low order numbers for P:NM #1. We had little operating capital and a double size single issue saved us a lot of money at the printers.

In the long run it did not matter anyway, the so called Direct Market became a bigger joke than the old Newstand Market. Even for the bigger companies it did not work all the time. If you ever wondered why a title by a giant in the industry like Jack Kirby or Neal Adams got canceled it’s real simple, LIMITED OR NO DISTRIBUTION. That’s right, the books never made it to a lot of stands and did not get into the hands of the fans. It still happens today. The World Wide Web is a much better Direct Market for comic books.

New Man’s first mission was not against a super villain. We had him go up against a terrorist. This was 1990 when we were putting all this together. The U.S. hadn’t had much trouble with terrorists at the time. So our story was maybe a little ahead of it’s time. We were trying to establish a super hero in the most realistic way we could think of. We got a lot of positive feedback from those who saw it.

Project: New Man #1 had an initial print run of about 3,000 issues. We only have a few office copies left of that little collectors item!

Mark’s Remarks:

I had a great time drawing this issue. I averaged 3 pages a day and once I drew 6 pages for that day. These were not your average 8 hour days, I worked 10 hours at a stretch usually. I like to use big panels on the 6 panel grid format, often utilizing 3-4 panels on a lot of pages and 1 panel splash pages through out much of the story in the tradition of my favorite storyteller/cartoonist: Jack Kirby.

Any questions or comments? All are welcome.