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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.
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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.