Digging Through The Years

The working on the attic continues at Casa Manley and as I rummage through the piles of stuff up there from old comics, to toys, magazines and all kinds of crap I have amassed from being a comic collector, to a pro, to being on a lot of comp lists, to stuff I stupidly bought on impulse. I have stopped collecting comics in a nay big way for a while now, partially because I have stuff I need to get rid of, but also because most comics today blow!
I don't want to go of on a rant about that because basically--who cares, and that's not the thrust of this post anyway. In the cleaning up and sorting I came across a huge box of old art, some goes well back into my high school years, some art is from 30 years ago like that Doc Samson drawing I posted. the late 70's, specifically 1977 was a really big year for me. First, Star Wars came out, second I bought my first issue of Heavy Metal. Both of course blew me away and really charged my imagination and artistic engine. one of my students, Samantha, commented a few weeks back that I mentioned Star Wars often when talking about storytelling points in the storyboard class, etc. I guess I didn't notice it, but I kinda' do for a variety of reasons.

It's hard for a 20 something today to really imagine what an impact that SW had on the world and guys in my generation. It changed the world in a lot of ways, and today we have so much entertainment,licensing, just gobs and gobs of stuff from games, comics, movies, toys, web stuff, man, you can't absorb even 10%. In fact we are jadded, spoiled by one big sci-fi, effects driven movies, game, etc., but 30 years ago most shit sucked, sucked bad,and that was all we had.


So at the same time Star wars was blowing up peoples imaginations then Heavy Metal came out. I still remember buying that first issue and just being god-smacked by it. The onslaught of the French and Euro cartoonist was like a thunderbolt. I had seen Corben's work before, but not DEN, and not Moebius. I hungrily scooped up each issue and as I was being changed. I had been a huge Neal Adams fan, Kirby, Buscema, Wood, Frazetta, that was my big school of influences as a budding comic artist and suddenly I see this stuff in Heavy metal and I was just floored, it was so different and so cool!

Theses comic strips I found are certainly done as a result of me being influenced by the Heavy metal crowd and Star Wars, but especially Moebius and that "clear-line' drawing style. I was trying to process that way of working through my matrix of American influences. I have no idea now about what the story was about and it seems I abandoned it after about 4 pages. I also drew it con pretty flimsy sketchbook paper, and as a result the pages are kinda bent up. There are plenty of problems with this stuff but they are better than a lot of the samples I did later to try and get in. Like many wanna-bes I'd tighten up or freeze up or draw what I thought "they'd want to see." I guess I somewhere around 18-19 years old when I did this stuff.