Star Wars age 9 Comic Book

My Arm – My Arm!

How the heck did I come to draw Solos body so badly? Especially considering that I seem to have been getting quite good at drawing at this stage, at around 13 or 14 years old. And I think can see the influence of IPC’s «Battle Comic in it. I can see tht it’s supposed to be pointing away from us, receding but… really!

Solo: “It’s headed for that small moon”

Death Star: “Who are you calling a small moon? What about your freakishly-small arm?

Solo: “Agh! He’s right… Kenobi—you old wizard! What the hell did you do to me!?!?”

Some Practicalities of Publishing

Anyhooo…. we’re half way though the main body of the book now, so everything flips the left. There will be an extra 10 or 20 pages which complete the book though. They were stapled together and added to the end. When you keep adding folded over A4 pages, there comes a point at which you have to guess whether you’ve arrived at the middle of the comic. You then stop adding sheets, and begin drawing on the other half. But inevitably—you get near the end of the book, you’ll discover that you’ve run out of blank pages on which to finish the story! So that’s how extra ones got stapled in at the end.

Art Notes

You know, as a kid, you might not give that much time to planning how you’re going to put the words and pictures together and tell the story. But come on!—to not even plan on an individual-page basis? The dialogue in this one is a mess. And another thing: a little effort doing some backgrounds would’ve helped. There aren’t any at all on this page!

Art Crimes

Someone was telling me a couple of years ago about a notoriously bad Marvel comic Inker who ruined lots of the great Gene Colan‘s pencils on the 1970s Tomb of Dracula comics. Not Tom Palmer now—he became Colan’s inker par excellence. They were an astoundingly great artistic team. Apparently this other er, fellow, sometimes even brushed black all over Gene’s beautiful backgrounds to save himself extra work!

The bastard

And it gets worse. Inkers, did and still do often work directly onto the pencil work. No lightboxes or fresh sheets of paper—they just inked all over it! And my God – you should see Colan’s original penciled pages.

AAAARRRGH!