Coventry Covers # 1

For the very first Coventry cover I wanted something that would stand out starkly on the comics racks, compared to every other comics cover out there. So I went with lots of negative space -- the white part of the cover. That way the logo and small frog painting would simply pop out at the casual viewer.

        Coventry had just about everything going against it. It was going to be a black and white comic book at a time when black and white books were retailer poison. This was well after the big black and white comic boom (started, for the most part, by the surprising success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), when any piece of crap in vaguely comic book form was ordered heavily and sold well -- not because of any value in the story, but because of the frenzy surrounding the latest funnybook trend. Black and white comics were hot, HOT, HOT. Anything in that format was selling big time! When the bubble inevitably burst many retailers, caught with thousands of unsalable crap-books, rather than blame their own excess, blamed any publisher who ever did, ever will, or ever thought of publishing a black and white comic book. Many retailers flat out refused to carry any black and white comic, period. So Coventry had that going against it.

        It was also coming out from a small and not too popular publisher -- Fantagraphics -- and from a cartoonist (moi) who, though he might have had some limited success in the past with Elementals, wasn't exactly a household name, even in a comics reading household.

        And it wasn't going to be a superhero book.

        With all of those strikes against the book, even before issue one was published, I thought I'd better come up with something truly dynamic for the first issue's cover. Since I couldn't hope to compete with the great comic cover artists working at the time, and since a real "action" cover would get lost in the sea of all-out-action covers every week, I decided to go a different way, creating a very static and unusual image.

        Mostly it worked. Judging strictly from anecdotal evidence -- there's no money at any level of the funnybook publishing field for detailed readership research -- it did exactly what it was intended to do, looking nothing like any other comic on the stands that week. Many claimed to pick it up strictly because the cover caught their eye.

        Oddly enough, in order to do the cover my way, I had to work out a deal with Fantagraphics where I wasn't paid for the covers. Well, of course I was paid for the covers, but not separate from the pay for providing the full issue of the book. With Ironwood, I got paid a separate (small, tiny, wee) fee for the cover of each issue. As a result, whichever underpaid brand new "this is my first job out of school" editor they had running the Eros comics imprint that week would try to "art direct" the covers as they came in. They would look at any given cover as a separate artifact from the book it was intended to accompany.

        Since I wasn't about to take any art directing from anyone where Coventry was concerned -- especially not from the "all book learning, but not an iota of experience" Eros editor idiot du jour, it was necessary to work out a pay structure where the cover had no particular status apart from the entire issue -- all of which was "hands off -- if you want to fiddle with this story in any way, then you better be prepared to pay a ton extra for that privilege." Fantagraphics couldn't afford to pay well, so they had to agree to let me to do what I wanted, which included a cover that was almost entirely composed of negative space (though they did squawk about it at the time, until they started getting in the initial retailer and reader reaction, at which time everything was fine).

        Someone once said -- and I apologize for not recalling who, since he deserves the credit -- that "a magazine can't survive the mistakes of more than one person." He (whoever he was) was talking about a slick monthly magazine -- like a fashion mag or something in that species -- but I think it equally applies here. I believe that is true in comic books and it's a lesson the publishers will never learn. One person has to be in charge, and though he will certainly make mistakes, they will be his mistakes and a story can survive those. What a story can't survive is a dozen or more people all second-guessing each other, until what finally comes out is a bunch of bland, unreadable pablum.

        I think that's at the heart of many of the terrible comics today -- including many of those I've produced recently for (and from) the DCU. Everything is second guessed from dozens of sources, and ultimately, though my name was in the credits, those were committee comics, and it showed -- especially since the committee handing down changes couldn't (or wouldn't) keep track of its own decisions, handing down contradictory instructions day by day.

        

Here's a slightly expurgated version of an actual conversation:

Editor: Bill, why did you put those members of the Suicide Squad through the Boom Tube and on the prison planet?

Bill: Because that's what I was told had to happen. That was one of the essential details that was handed down to me.

Editor: Who said that?

Bill: Everyone did, at that big meeting in New York, when we all had lunch while going over the things that had to occur in the first or second issue. You were there.

Editor: Yeah, maybe, but it interferes with something that's going on in another book.

Bill: Not my problem. This is one of the many last-minute changes that were handed to me, mere days after everyone up there swore this would be a series without any last-minute changes.

Editor: Well, what were you planning on doing with those characters there?

Bill: I have no idea. As I said, this came from you guys in New York. I assumed, since they had to be sent there, that you guys had some idea of why and what they would be doing.

And so on. I could relate dozens of similar conversations with many different editors. I trust I've made my point. Comics that are the result of a single guiding vision -- preferably of the poor sucker actually tasked with telling the story -- aren't guaranteed to be good. They just have a fighting chance of it. Committee Comics are broken from conception.

        Back to the first Coventry cover: This is one of the few pieces that I can still look at today and be fully satisfied. It came out exactly as I imagined it. I like the small painted frog enough that I keep using it -- here for example, as the art bullet for any blog item that wouldn't otherwise have anything visual to go with it. I do like that frog.

More bad elves...

When I was writing the afore-mentioned unfinished novel, I was posting the finished chapters online, on the old Clockwork Storybook site (long defunct).

        One of the fellows reading said posts posited that my elves looked to be a weird cross between American Indians and Scottish highlanders. That seemed a fair observation.

        The couple on the far left are a rare species of elf called Herne Elves, for what I imagine are obvious reasons.

That there's a bad elf...

The gentleman on the right has killed twelve men in battle. How do we know this? Well, that's what the title says, true, but it's all about the braids in his hair. Years ago, in an unfinished novel, I posited a highly warlike culture among elves, and one of the ways in which they show their battlefield accomplishments is by adding a braid in their hair for every opponent they've killed in battle. Of course with the more successful of these long-lived warriors they might run out of hair long before they run out of dead enemies that need honoring. So they have attachments that show one braid equals ten dead enemies, or a hundred dead enemies, and so on.

        This fellow is wearing one braid with a ten-dead-opponents sigil, plus two single-opponent braids. Therefore he's claiming twelve enemies killed in battle. Tough little guy, huh?

        Matthew Sturges, my friend and longtime writing partner (and future Fine Fellow here -- bet on it) borrowed, with my blessing, this practice for one of the characters in his excellent novel Midwinter, which was published once in very limited release some years ago, but a substantially new version of which is due out in a major release from Pyr Press later this year. He also borrowed my notion that the reason the queen of fairy is often called Titania and other times called Mab is because they are two separate individuals, one of which is queen of the seelie court (Titania) and the other queen of the unseelie court (Mab). In fact Matt was so busy borrowing ideas I left lying around that I was able to lift his wallet without getting caught. Okay, that was a joke. Not a big joke, mind you, or even a funny one, but a joke nonetheless. One day we'll try to add up all of the good ideas I've borrowed from Matt. It's the nature of our business. When it's done above board and openly, it's a sign of the generosity and general goodwill among folks in our racket. When it's done clandestinely, surreptitiously and without permission, it's a sign that a new Harry Potter novel is about to be published.

        Okay, now that was a much better joke.

        But seriously, folks, the reason I point this out is to mark a bit of territory, so that later, when my own prose work comes out using the same ideas, I'll have this item to point to, to demonstrate that I don't steal all of my best ideas from Matt -- just most of them.

        My sketchbooks in this period of time show many examples of tough, warlike elves, so this must have been when I was beginning to work up ideas for that as yet unfinished novel (which I won't name here, since it needs substantial reworking before -- if ever -- it sees the light of day). The notion of very tough elves -- as opposed to the prissy, twee, fancy-pants, emo versions in so many other fantasy worlds -- is not new to me. Not by a long shot. My first exposure to the idea was with Ralph Bakshi's cult favorite animated feature Wizards. It's a very flawed, but still remarkable, film.

Sketchbook Stuff

I'm not sure I have anything to comment about this sketchbook page of doodles. These are all done originally in pencils of course. Then, back when I was producing a good deal of comic art -- back in the Ironwood and Coventry days -- I would warm up my inking hand by first inking a few of the sketches in one of my sketchbooks. That's how the majority of them came to be inked, and that's where I tried out new inking a pencilling styles.

Sketchbook Stuff

Many of the members of the so-called Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that came along decidedly post Raphael by the way, kept drawing this one woman named Jane Morris. Some used her as the model for whatever painting they were doing, while she simply shows up in the sketchbooks and discardia of others. When I finally ran across an actual photograph of Miss Jane Morris, I understood why, and had to copy it for myself. Captivating woman.

        At this time I was just beginning to get a wildness to my brushstroke that I liked and continued to pursue and develop. If I can ever recapture it someday -- it faded when I stopped drawing as much as I was doing back then -- I'm going to try to introduce it to my comics work. Assuming I can ever get around to drawing comics again.

Sketchbook Stuff

In the very same sketchbook, which was started at least two years before I began to think about the series Pantheon -- so this would have been around 1989 or '90, but don't hold me to that because my time sense is a bit spotty in some areas -- I also drew this character whom I called Fortress America. In fact, I had the name Fortress America first and tried to design an image to fit, unlike in the case of Dynasty, where I had the image in mind first and eventually found a name and an identity to fit. An armored character who has the word 'fortress' as part of his name has to be big and solid, and I think this fellow fit the bill nicely.

        As you can begin to see, with this and the previous post, when I began to think about the series Pantheon, I went shopping among my old notes and sketchbooks for characters to people it with. If you're going to write or draw comics, or both, you have to keep notebooks and/or sketchbooks. This seems a no-brainer, but it took me a while to figure that much out.

Sketchbook Stuff

This is my first run at drawing the character Dynasty, who would later star in the 13 issue maxi series Pantheon, published by Lone Star Press. I'm still quite fond of this design and by this time I was beginning to get results I liked with the inking brush. Of course, by this time I had no idea who the character was or that she'd be named Dynasty. I only had an image in my mind of the dragon symbol wrapped around one leg, before showing up on her chest, where most self-respecting superhero symbols appear.

        I think it's sort of humorous that several critics of the Pantheon series went out of their way to point out what they considered a mistake in the character design, because the woman was clearly (East) Indian, but the dragon design was obviously Asian. Apparently, according to these critics, I don't know one culture from another. So let's get this straight: American superheroes can adopt all sorts of symbology from other cultures, but non-American superheroes are required to stick within the culture of their origin -- period. Got it. Understood.

        Do I work in a silly profession, or what?

        By the way, the character to the left of Dynasty was going to be a superhero called Unicorn -- part of the super team called The Bestiary. But the Bestiary never actually made an appearance in Pantheon. I intended them to, but simply ran out of room. Though they were referred to once or twice in other character's dialogue, they ended up on the funnybook equivalent of the cutting room floor. That happens.

Speaking of Ironwood...

Okay, no one was speaking of Ironwood. But anyway, this was an illustration I did to accompany an Ironwood prose story for a short-lived independent funnybook called Mythography (great name). Compositionally this has many problems, but I was getting control of my inking brushwork (Windsor Newton Series 7 or nothing) and I sort of like how the beer stein and bread came out.

A Huntress page...

In late '93 my comics illustrating career was pretty much on the skids. The fairly critically and sales successful Elementals had come and gone, after a reasonable run of fifty-plus issues (broken into two volumes of 25 or so issues each).

        First digression: Advice to new cartoonists: When you're producing a run of funnybooks, don't let the publisher talk you into finding an excuse to start again at issue # 1, under the justification that it will bump up sales. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't, but the hassle of trying to sort out, for the rest of your years, which Elementals # 1 was the first # 1, and so on, aren't worth it.

        Back to the essay: If I recall correctly, I was still writing and illustrating (and lettering and everything elseing) Ironwood for Fantagraphics' Eros line. But I was finishing an installment of Ironwood less often with each succeeding issue, and the overall sales weren't exactly ripping up the charts.

        Marvel was a closed shop to me by then, following several frustrating years worth of aborted attempts to launch new projects there, as a writer or artist, or both, but always running afoul of the smug, childish and cliquish editorial culture that flourished there at the time -- behaviors for which I never had any tolerance, and was perhaps a bit too vocal in criticizing.

        Second digression: This seems to be no longer the case at Marvel. Based entirely on my admittedly limited interactions with them of late, an admirable level of professionalism and courtesy seems to be the standard there now, rather than the exception.

        Returning again to our essay: DC was mostly a closed shop to me then too, but not due to a lack of professionalism on their parts, but this time based almost entirely on my past failures to deliver assigned pages (I'd worked strictly as a hired-gun artist for them up to then) in a timely manner -- or at all in a few cases.

        But DC had been willing to give me work in the past and hadn't entirely gotten to the point where editors refused even to take my calls. However, more than one editor, upon learning that it was me on the line, began any conversation by saying, "You better not be looking for work!" Unfortunately I was looking for work, needing to find a pencilling job or face the unenviable prospect of getting honest work outside of the funnybook field. So, in late '93 I was calling around the DC offices looking for a book to draw.

        Neal Pozner was editing a series called Showcase '93 at that time. The title was doing double duty, describing both that Showcase was a place to feature new talent and to feature stories about second and third-string DCU characters that had no regular books of their own. Even though I wasn't exactly new talent by then,  Neal had never worked with me before and let me draw a two-part Huntress story that would appear (I believe) in issues # 9 and 10.

        Right away Neal heard from other DC staffers that he'd made a terrible mistake and was likely insane for taking a chance on me. He grew justifyably worried, based on those war stories of my past failings. But he'd already assigned the job and was too encumbered with human decency to withdraw the offer.

        I did the work, buckled down, determined to mend fences, rebuild bridges -- pick your metaphor. There were two hitches in the job though. One was simply fun and silly and one wasn't. First, it was a story about Huntress following a vicious gunrunner to a white-supremacist enclave in the mountains of Idaho. This wasn't a case of hot pursuit, where the hero would have no time to plot and plan. Huntress had a few days to prepare for the mission and then followed the villain out to Idaho, from Gotham, on a later flight. Anticipating this, trying to do a good job with the script and thoroughly think through its implications, I decided to design a cold-weather costume for the Huntress. After all, she was supposed to be a female equivalent of Batman (though operating on more of a budget) and ranked in his general ballpark as far as wit, cunning and intelligence, right? Any moron knowing she was going to a mountainous, snowy environment would outfit herself differently than the standard skimpy little-more-than-a-bathing-suit job that she usually wore in Gotham, right?

        Wrong.

        The problems was, if DC let me design a new winter outfit for her, they'd have to pay me a fee for doing so, above and beyond my page rate, and perhaps even open the door for a later legal claim on my part that I owned part of the character, having helped visually design her. That sort of nonsense just wasn't in the sales-meager Showcase's shoestring budget. No matter what the consequences for the story, Huntress simply had to stay in her skimpy costume.

        So I ended up drawing many panels of Huntress in the snow, obviously shivering her bottom off with the cold, trying to keep wrapped up in her cape, and not exactly making a case for the notion that she was a wise and clever superhero.

        That was the fun -- or at least silly -- one of the two problems.

        The other hitch wasn't nearly as entertaining. After I'd completed all of the art for both installments (40 pages in total), which included an extended guest appearance from Batman in the final 20 pages, someone at DC realized that this story would come out after their big event where the original Batman gets his back broken and would be temporarily replaced by a guy named Azarael in a vastly different version of the Batman suit -- which was quite well suited for cold weather operations, by the way, so even this new guy upstart hero had more sense than poor dim Huntress.

        So I had to go back and redraw any of the far too many pages in which Batman appeared. No problem, right? Just change a few costume details and we're golden. But there was a pretty big problem, because the new Batman was a bulky figure, entirely different in shape from the original figure, with lots of extra spiky things sticking out all over. I couldn't simply change a few costume details, I had to completely redraw each of the many panels featuring Batman.

        For that reason DC had to pay me a fairly substantial redrawing fee, beyond my page rate. This didn't win me any new friends up there, when that's exactly what I was trying to do with this job. They couldn't understand why I wasn't thrilled to be one of the first artists to draw the thrilling new Batman. Shouldn't that have been reward enough?

        In any case, the problems were worked out and a redrawing fee was eventually agreed upon by both parties. And even with the extra work involved, I still managed to get the job in early. Neal Pozner couldn't have been happier and made a point to tell me, "I don't care what anyone else says. I'll give you work anytime you want it."

        Mission accomplished. My failing career received the new jumpstart I was looking for.

        Shortly afterwards Neal, that truly good man, died of complications resulting from his long (unknown to me at the time) battle with AIDS.

        I maintain a lingering fondness for this Huntress story, despite the minor (in hindsight) hiccups along the way. Terry Austin inked me on this job, which was quite an honor for me. I'd been his fan for some years. To this day I can still look back at my artwork for this story and not completely recoil in horror -- which is rare for me on any past work. As you might begin to guess by now, I'm not the biggest fan of my own comics artwork.

        Terry and I never got a chance to work together again, which is too bad, because I think something in our styles meshed together well. Then again, his skills and talent went a long way towards covering up my many sins of bad anatomy and worse composition. He's darn good at fixing things.

        Following this job it would be some long years before DC and I got back on track with each other.

A page from my first comics work...

Some of you who know my career too well might argue that those D&D ads in the back of Epic Magazine and Marvel Comics were my first comics work, but you'd be wrong. More about that someday... maybe.

        My first professional comics work was with First Comics, an upstart comics publisher based in Evanston Illinois. They published a comic -- their flagship comic -- called Warp, based upon an odd stage play, made only vaguely interesting by the Neal Adams production drawings and costume designs.

        One of the characters in Warp was named Valeria the Insect Queen. In issues 8 and 9 (or maybe 9 and 10 -- I'm going by highly faulty memory here) of the comic they gave her her own backup story and allowed me the opportunity to draw it. Here is one page of the results. I believe this is the last page of the two-part story.

        I'd like to say I have mixed emotions about this page and about that job, but I can't. I've no lingering fondness for it and can only look at this page and the others from that job in a steady state of full-cringe. My artistic influences of the period controlled me to the extent that, though I can't go so far as to say they constituted plagiarism, I also can't say I was doing my own work. A talented young man named Bruce Patterson inked this job (though it may have been Pattersen, and then again it may have been someone else entirely -- I've tried so hard to forget these years that it's not easy now to resurrect them), and he covered up many of my sins.

        You can see in the upper part of the third panel that a character is missing. I'm not sure who or why. I barely recall the story. But in the old days of comic production -- the pre computer days -- corrections were often made by photocopying art and then literally pasting the copy down on a page. That is how we moved visual elements around on a page back then. My guess is that a photocopied paste-up of the missing character fell off of the original art page, when the glue dried and dissipated over the years.

        At the same time I was producing these pages, I was drawing the first ever Elementals 20-page story that would eventually be printed as the backup to the short-lived Texas Comics' Justice Machine Annual # 1 (and only, as it turned out). That work is less horrifying to me now, only because it was my own work for the most part. The terrible mistakes I made on the Elementals stuff were at least my own mistakes and not someone else's.

        But this Warp backup job counts as my first comic book work, even though I was doing Elementals at the same time, because it was published first. I would go on to do several additional backups in Warp, none of which are worth trying to find.

        First Comics doesn't exist anymore, nor does Texas Comics, Noble Comics (the first of the independent comics companies that tried to publish my work and died before being able to do so), or Comico. All of the small independent companies I worked for, or tried to work for, in the early years of my career are gone now. There's a lesson here for someone. DC, are you listening?

I'm not certain, but...

I think this may have been my first published comic book cover (this is a detail shot -- the entire cover was a wrap-around, with more characters on the back, and had room for the titles and such). It was for Issue One of the Elementals, published by Comico in 1983. In hindsight, it was pretty deplorable, but I suppose I didn't think so at the time.

Long ago I used to draw as well as write funnybooks...

But I started out fairly slow and got slower as the years progressed. Here's a page from one of my sketchbooks. I like the woman's t-shirt design. This was drawn back when I was beginning to become more interested in how real clothes drape and fold on a human body, and therefore less interested in drawing people in skin tight costumes, making me more and more unfit for superhero work. There may be a story in Joey Sato's Discount Backcountry Ranger Corps someday, but then again, maybe not.