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.

Systems of Notation: Script, Thumbnails, Art!

Here are the thumbnails to the remaining new pages I am creating for the collected Border Worlds, coming in the Fall of 2016 from Dover Publications. They are based on a very tight script written in November 2015, so dialogue has already been worked out, although still subject to modification as I transfer to pencil art. When I was a beginner in the 1980s, I usually outline a plot in bullet points on a legal pad, then thumbnailed or sometimes sketched out the art full size on Bristol board. At the time, it seemed logical, if one was thinking of comics primarily as a visual storytelling medium, to think visually from start to finish, i.e., non-verbally. However, if I had to set aside the thumbnails aside for any length of time, I would have trouble remembering exactly what I was thinking based only on the sometime very low-res scribbles (this was a major crisis when I took six weeks off to attend comic book conventions in the middle of production of Yarn Man #1!).

Spoiler Alert: This won't give anything away unless you can read Scribble! (Pencil layouts for some pages can be seen in other posts on this blog.)

During Border Worlds in 1986 and 1987, I worked in an almost bi-polar fashion from issue to issue, working visually (thumbnail) one issue, then script the next (particularly if an issue was dominated by a lot of dialogue), then visually again. These days (the twenty-first century), I find that a full script is best even when a particular sequence is predominantly visual or non-verbal. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is far easier to type "close up" than to sketch a close up, even in a scribbly thumbnail. I also refine the dialogue, describe the panel compositions in great detail (who is in the foreground, background, left, right, directions characters are facing, camera angles, etc.) and often character psychology and what the reader knows or doesn't know. Alan Moore is the only writer I have worked with who works to such a degree, and his artistic success speaks for itself. (Most comic book writers compose scripts that are very schematic, like recipes, that keep the illustrator in the dark unnecessarily, as if they were a member of the audience who needs to be kept in suspense instead of a member of the creative team whose job it is to convey the ideas to the reader. It's like baking something without knowing exactly what, and I have to read the script three times to figure it out, before I have a handle on what needs to be drawn.)

My own scripts enable me to describe the events going on in my imagination, and pick up where I left off, even if I have to set aside a project for any length of time. Besides, every project of any length requires multiple working sessions over days, weeks, or months (and in the case of Border Worlds, years and decades), so a solid notation system enables me to resume work each session without guessing, "What the heck was this indecipherable little scribble supposed to mean?" (We'll see how well this system works when I return to Megaton Man, for which I have fully scripted issues #4 and #5 of a new series; I was laying out the fourth issue from a full script when Dover called wanting Border Worlds!) Stay tuned for more updates during 2016!

Sparky and Jenny: The Sequence That Has Taken Forever!

Here is the original art for a page first sketched circa 1998. The main characters were inked sometime thereafter. This weekend (2015) I've finally completed the backgrounds and some of the textures on Jenny's spacesuit (eventually, I finish what I start!). Matching my old stuff often presents a challenge, but this scene was pretty well realized in my sketchbook (right), and I think holds up pretty well. In the fall of 2016, Dover Publications will be collecting the complete Border Worlds including the original Megaton Man back-up features and all black and white issues, with 30 new pages of story and other unpublished goodies. Stay tuned for more details!

Brush, pen and ink on Bristol board (left) and original sketchbook (right) of a new page for the upcoming Border Worlds collection, coming in 2016 from Dover Publications, Inc.

Jenny marches off after she discovers Dr. Beecher has already left Stardome for good, and can't help stop Drake and Cody's deportation back to earth.

Original roller-pen sketch, circa 1998.

Jenny flies without heeding Sparky's sensible warning that she should have checked her fuel gauge after using the jet pack for such an extended period.

Original sketchbook layout.

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!

"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.