Jenny's Past: A Work in Progress

I am working on a scene from Jenny's past, prior to Border Worlds, when she was a college student on earth, and when she earned money as an artist's model for drawing classes (you didn't know that, did you? I didn't either). The scene began as a tiny page thumbnail in my sketchbook, and I have been working it out at a larger size with tracing paper. In this case I am not working from a script, and am learning about the character as I explore this period in her life. More to come.

This is the original thumbnail sketch, about 3 inches wide, made within the last year.

Here are some separate explorations in blue, graphite, and Uni-Ball, wherein I am attempting to find the right age, expression, and attitude of the character. In this scene, Jenny is supposed to be in her early 20s, whereas in the Border Worlds series she was in her late twenties. Not much of a difference, but significant. The top left head has the right balance of youth and inexperience; the bottom right she is a bit too old. I want to get the sense that she is young but tired from all her activities and burning the candle from both ends (she is also on an athletic scholarship).

This the development of that thumbnail, blown up to about 11 inches wide, and elaborated in blue and graphite pencil on canary yellow tracing paper, the kind once prevalent in the drafting industry, but which I have gravitated to for some reason.

Here is the second part.

As an artist's model in college, Jenny takes a break from a pose and puts on her robe.

Again a scene from college. An athlete, Jenny returns from practice, and has an issue with a dorm neighbor who seems a little too preoccupied with recording Jenny for a documentary.

More to follow!

Border Worlds Commission Drawings: A Spring Break Slew of Art!

It's a fun time at the ol' drawing board these days! With a newly-complete Megaton Man graphic novel in the coloring stage, a 25-anniversary reprint of Splitting Image (with normalman vs. Megaton Man) as an 80-page Giant" coming from Image Comics on April 26, 2017, and the Dover collection of Border Worlds (with a new concluding chapter) arriving in August 2017, fans and collectors are requesting a wider variety of convention sketches and commission drawings spanning my 30-year career as never before!

Here is a selection of drawings I inked over the past week, including a lovely sketch of Jenny in her obsessively-textured space suit! If you are interested in acquiring a custom drawing of your favorite Don Simpson character before the 2017 rush turns into an outright frenzy, please send me an email at donaldsimpson1713 circle "a" symbol gmail period com, and I'll be sure to get back to you.

Pencil drawings in light blue Col-Erase and graphite on Strathmore 400 Drawing, ready to ink.

Partially inked.

Batmegaton, inked.

MODOK inked.

Connie Carlyle and friend, from a sketch started at a comic book convention, inked (and poorly lit).

Aja, the alternate Ms. Megaton Man, and Connie Carlyle, Megaton Man's new sidekick.

Jenny Woodlore, partially inked.

Jenny inked.

Several days worth of work!

More commission art here.

Theory of Relativity: Varying Art Sizes in Border Worlds Through the Ages!

I began experimenting with the size of my original art in the 1980s, particularly in Border Worlds, and the tradition (or indecision?) continues into the twenty-first century. The image below is a good example: on the left, an 11" x 17" original (10" x 15" image area), the size I started out with in Megaton Man in the mid-1980s. which would reduce to about 60% at printed size; in the middle, the cover to Border Worlds #1, 11.5" x 14.5" (8.5" x 13.25" image area), for a 77% reduction, as shown; and my current practice, 11" x 14" (9.5" x 12.5" image area), a half-page tier that will reduce to under 50%. I did at least a couple issues of Border Worlds at 77% and contemplated going "twice up" (50% reduction), but at the time found it unwieldy. Obviously, the larger the art, the greater reduction, and the more the detail will tighten up and the less obvious will be the rough edges. Also, the easier it is on my aging eyes and wrist! (The half-page tier also makes it easier for me to reach the top of the art, Mr. Drawing Board Belly!)

A pin-up for the Amazing Heroes Swimsuit Special circa 1990; the cover to Border Worlds #2 (1986; "Worlds" was reversed out at the bottom of the design in the printed version); and a half-page pencil rough from 2015.

The Dover collection of Border Worlds (coming in Fall 2016) will include all of the Megaton Man back-up features, all eight issues of Border Worlds (including Marooned #1), and 30 pages of new material that I am currently producing, as well as several unpublished covers and extras. Not only will all these variously-sized originals appear side-by-side, but also the compendium of stylistic influences, from Moebius (Jean Giraud) to Wally Wood, and film designers such as John Dykstra to Ron Cobb (Star Wars and Alien, respectively), to say nothing of the influence of Lost in Space, Star Trek, and black and white art films such as the Cinemascope Woody Allen film Manhattan, magazine layout design, and everything else. Trying to match any of that at this point with my new stuff is mathematically impossible, so I can only do my current thing and hope for the best, but it is an incredible and unexpected opportunity to add to the mythos in middle-age! It will be interesting to see how well it all hangs together!

The ladies from Border Worlds #5 (one of the issues drawn at 77%) make a curtain call in the new segment I'm creating for the Dover compilation of Border Worlds, coming in Fall 2016.

If you would like to own an original drawing of Jenny or any of the Border Worlds cast, please visit the Don Simpson Commission Art Price List page and contact me!

Lost Thumbnails: Practice Page Designs from c. 2002

Here is a marker rough I drew on a sheet of 14' x 17" layout paper, probably circa 2002, of a series of pages featuring Jenny from Border Worlds. There doesn't seem to be any clear storyline; rather, these are simply page-design studies. Some scenes evoke material from the original series; others are new moments that fill in some gap in the narrative. No doubt I was pretending to be Ralph McQuarrie (production designer of the original Star Wars), or at least Howard Chaykin. I may have been practicing with markers before attempting other sketches that are a more coherent retelling of the Border Worlds story that I am still developing.

"Appropriating" Stephen D. Sullivan: Anatomy of a Swipe!

Here is a Uni-Ball sketch I made on canary yellow tracing paper from a print out of a figure from the cover of Steve Sullivan's Zombie Shark. The author and illustrator uses part of the image on his Google profile, and I fell in love with the pose (or "gesture," as they say in fine arts, or "motive" if you are Sir Kenneth Clark). In any event, it suggested a pose for Jenny Woodlore, so I traced a print out, and this is what I got. I'm going to blow it up again and trace it some more, something like what I imagine to have been Gil Kane's method of developing figure drawings, until I have something that will almost be original! If all goes according to plan, Steve will never find out...!

Sketch, approximately 8 1/2" x 11".

Sketch next to black and white printout; actual detail.

I must say that usually when I swipe (or "study," as I prefer to say), I simply copy the figure, that is to say, I just look at the original and eyeball it, drawing it freehand on paper, with the print or online source in view. Most such studies remain in my sketchbook, although some can lend themselves to repurposing. I never used to swipe in my early comics, if only because when I copied a photographic source of some sort it always stuck out like a sore thumb. Now I am able to make changes as I did here (reducing the bust and augmenting her calcaneus (heel bone). Tracing usually doesn't yield very useful results, and in this case she is a bit too "butty" in the way her torso is twisted, that I may address if I develop this further.

Early Jenny Sketches Unearthed!

Here are some very early sketches of Jenny Woodlore, protagonist of Border Worlds, from the sketchbooks of Kika Kane, made in the wee hours of some long-lost San Diego Comicon night in 1985! Denis Kitchen took me to this gathering of underground cognoscenti at the Hotel San Diego, a charmingly seedy once-grand hotel which later served as a setting for parts of the seedy 2000 film Traffic (Miguel Ferrer is held in custody there but meets his end when his room service is poisoned). These soirées included the like of Don Donahue, R.L. Crabb, the late and beloved Dori Seda, S. Clay Wilson, Dan O'Neill, Spain Rodriguez, Jim Valentino, Larry Marder, Gary Groth, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Trina  Robbins, and a host of other figures on the cusp between the underground and alternative generation of comics creators.

Over the subsequent dozen or so years, I attended several of Kate's (as I knew her then) salon des bandes desinées, always lagging behind due to the 3-hour time difference between the midwest and California, and usually exhausted from days of conventioneering. Inhibited introvert that I was, I also generally had more than trace amounts of alcohol, tobacco, and THC in my bloodstream, indulgences that almost only took place by hanging out with the wrong kind of people! These factors contributed (but by no means excused) the fact that over the years I polluted Kate/Kika's sketchbook with every manner of sordid Anton Drek sketch, all in some kind of misguided neurotic effort to outdo the "bad boys," most of which I cannot show here without going "adults only."

One of the problems I had in drawing Megaton Man and especially in the transition to Border Worlds was in approaching realistically-proportioned characters, something I only began to solve as the eighties came to a close. Here that struggle is on display, at about the time I was beginning work on the first Border Worlds back-up feature for Megaton Man #6 (October 1985).

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The sketch below is from 1989, and already shows an interest in greater similitude (the sketch of Nicole Panter from memory being a case in point). Trying to be all "stream of consciousness" like R. Crumb! (The blatantly erotic elements should give you some idea of the raunchy tenor of the other sketches I did in Kate's three sketchbooks.)

My thanks to Kika Kane for allowing me to snap photos of these forgotten images at her home in Marin County in June 2014! Below is probably the most accomplished of my sketches, from 1991.

Jenny Woodlore™

Jenny in an illustration, pen and ink with Photoshop.

Jenny Takes a Break: A Work in Progress II

Jenny steps down from the model platform in this refined development on canary yellow paper.

See Jenny's Past: A Work in Progress

Freefall II: The Contraptoid

This is the rough tissue and final art for a page relating to others I have posted.

Freefall: Sketches and Art for a Post-Marooned Jenny Sequence

At the end of Border Worlds: Marooned (1990), Jenny Woodlore had made her way by jetpack to the penthouse abode of Dr. Oliver Beecher, only to find Sparky the robot with the message that the good doctor had already evacuated Chrysalis, the domed city. A scene was subsequently sketched out and partially finished realized as finished artwork in the 1990s, reconstructed her from extant materials. In it, Sparky plays a recording made by Beecher for Jenny on a Contraptoid-like robot, informing her that the space station is on a collision course with a neighboring planet. 

Jenny, already exhausted from her climb out of the bowels of the space station, and devastated by the arrest of Drasin and Cody and the loss of the hotrod, straps her jetpack back on to leave the penthouse. Her depleted fuel supply is used up before she can land in the park below, and she freefalls through the trees, protected only by her space suit. Crashing to the ground, she is assisted by onlookers, and staggers to her feet only to collapse again in a fountain. After she revives, she makes her way to a tramway that takes her back to the hangar on the outskirts of the plate of the space station. Removing her space suit, she collapses in tears in the shower, and finally passes out, nude, on her bed. The conclusion of this sequence marks the approximate halfway point of the story material planned for Border Worlds.

Below are several sheets of chisel-point marker sketches from the same sketchbook. The appearance of the Meddler and Rory Smash on one of them date these to around the time I was working on Bizarre Heroes, and particular the final issue (#0), when I was contemplating a time-travel crossover.