Dandy Demo: A Workshop Wonder

For years I ran a cartooning workshop in Pittsburgh, mostly at the Community College of Allegheny County and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, but also at Sweetwater and the Carnegie Museum of Art. These character poses, of Gower Goose and Megaton Man, respectively, are from a demonstration piece I did in one workshop, probably around 2000. I scanned it and colored it digitally in 2018.

Megaton Man and Gower Goose!

The original 14" x 17" sheet of Bristol board. I would improvise such demonstration pieces on the spot, and they would turn out only slightly less coherent than my more planned-out work!

[I belatedly realize I should have posted this to my Megaton Man™ blog, but it's too much trouble to change it over at this point! Oh, well, Clarissa can use the traffic.]

Greetings from Warhead Beach: A Swimsuit Postcard Pin-Up!

Back in the roaring 80s, a fanzine called Amazing Heroes published an annual swimsuit issue edited by the late Mr. Kim Thompson, one of the founders, along with Gary Groth, of Fantagraphics Books.

The newly-colorized postcard version!

In 1990, the cast of Megaton Man™, including our very own Ms. Megaton Man, Clarissa James, took their turn for some fun and sun. The original, printed in gritty black and white on newsprint, has been colorized for the 21st century!

A limited-edition 11" x 17" print of this piece will be coming to NEO Con 2018 in Olmsted, Ohio, August 19, and you'll be able to get yours autographed by Don Simpson!

The original: pen, brush and ink with dot screen on Bristol board.

Note: There was also a Border Worlds™ pin-up that will be coming to blog near you soon!


Stella Starlight™, Tad ‘n’ Rover™, Yarn Man™, Clarissa James™, Partyers from Mars™ and other characters Megaton Man™ and © Don Simpson 2018, all rights reserved.

Stretch Before You Sketch: Ms. MM Warm-Ups!

Update (April 7, 2018): Finally colored these figures in Photoshop:

Originally posted October 30, 2014:

I have been doing a lot of penciling and to warm up, and I have a tendency to sketch Ms. Megaton Man in one form or another. (It's important to stretch before you sketch, particularly when a comic book is in production; otherwise you can pull a muscle!) As a character that straddles the comedic and dramatic, Clarissa has all the energy that I always loved about comics, and she just rolls out of my pencil.

Light Blue Col-Erase and Staedtler Mars Lumograph H pencil on Strathmore Recycled Sketchbook.

Update November 7, 2014: Some of these warm-up sketches seem worthy to develop further, so I scan and print out (often, slightly larger than the original). This frees the drawing from the sketchbook (where they often originate) and also preserve the original pencil drawing. This gives me a sense of freedom when I ink (I know I can't screw it up, since I can always go back to the original and try again), and that relaxation paradoxically is usually enough to ensure a positive outcome on the first try (go figure!).

The ink finals, below:

Hunt #102 Crowquill pen and India ink on Clearprint Design Vellum.

Hunt #102 Crowquill pen and India ink on Clearprint Design Vellum.

Clarissa Leaps Into the Void!

Just colored another pose, this one inked last fall (2014):

Link: Clarissa antagonizes Megaton Man and the Knight Watchmen!

More Traced Sketches: Don's Convoluted New Inking Method Explained!

More Ms. Megaton Man poses, culled from sketchbooks dating back to 2010, inked on Clearprint 1000HP Design Vellum yesterday (June 18, 2014). At this point, I've probably inked about 80% of the inkable images from my old and current sketchbooks, by which I mean tightly penciled and ready to ink with minimal modification. I didn't ink them at the time because a) they were spontaneous, casual sketches, and I had no immediate purpose in mind for them; b) the drawing paper of the various sketchbooks might by fine for penciling but less suitable to ink; and c) the images often were a bit too small to ink comfortably; and d) inking them in the sketchbook, while leaving the sketchbook intact, would have been a bit cumbersome. Still, when I looked over these images, I would say, "Gee, I ought to do something with these!" Through trial and error, I think I've optimized a method of scanning, blowing up, printing out, and using Clearprint, along with Elmer's repositionable glue stick, to salvage these freely-drawn images from the obscurity of my sketchbooks. Are they just clip art now, or will certain poses make their way into future story panels and pages? Stay tuned.

Clarissa gets zapped by some unknown ray. Unlike most of the characters in the Megaverse, who say "Darn!" or "#$%@!?!," Ms. Megaton Man is one that I feel should explicitly swear. She will say "ass" instead of "butt," etc. In other words, she's got a mouth on her, and I can't seem to do anything about it.

This is a shot of the old drawing board and the original Moleskine sketchbook, with the drawing in Col-Erase Light Blue pencil and graphite pencil, next to the blow up and the ink final on Clearprint (the orange pads below are Clearprint pads of different sizes that I prefer. The original image is about 7" tall, which I blew up to 11". Determining the right size is somewhat arbitrary. Most of sketches I've inked utilizing this method have been fairly close to size, so this is unusually enlarged. This photo also gives a good idea of the translucence of the Clearprint material. Note the Pro-White corrections on the final.

Here is something of an awkward pose for Ms. Megaton Man. I may have been looking at Ross Andru again!!

Here is a rather robust and somewhat lanky version of Clarissa. Usually she is more compact, but here she turned out more expansive than usual.

This was a swipe from a fitness image, modified quite a bit since the original source had the left forearm across the bust line, and was cropped mid-thigh. I think the result counts as original, or at least not actionable! (A special Woo-Prize if you can identify the source!)

For some reason, this pose taps into some obscure John Romita-John Buscema-Jim Mooney-Dick Giordano melange of influences. There are a lot of comic books I read as a youth but never consciously studied to emulate as a cartoonist (particularly true of Ross Andru, who was not a favorite at the time, although I can respect certain aspects of his craft nowadays); still, a these influences seem to be burbling up lately as I become less concerned of hewing to a particular style and simply try to get the job done!

One of the pitfalls of my current method is record keeping. I've tried various kinds of scanning, photocopying, and sizing; consequently I have a lot of print outs tucked away in different folders, envelopes, and boxes. In this case, this led to me inking something that I'd forgotten I'd inked before! The first time was mostly with a brush, while the second was entirely with a crowquill. In the first one the linework is a bit fatter, but otherwise I don't discern much qualitative difference. This speaks to one of the advantages this way of inking has over penciling and inking on the same piece of Bristol board: you can always ink it again if you mess up or don't like the first result!

The main advantage of this method, as I said, is that I can salvage some good work from past sketchbooks, but it also comes in handy for making corrections and possibly inking images for which the original is lost and only a reproduction or poor quality photograph remains. Most of my sketchbooks are filled with doodles and scribbles that would require a great deal of further refinement at the pencil stage before they could be inked; in those cases, it would almost be easier to just begin with a new sheet of paper and start from scratch, eyeballing the original doodle for reference. But I have also adapted this method for new panels, tiers and pages -- it saves having to erase the pencil lines from the original artwork, which can sometimes fade the ink lines.

One last pose, reminiscent of Gil Kane inked by John Romita, some of my favorite comic book artwork of all time. Appropriate for Clarissa!

World of Tiers: From Pencil to Ink

Here is the evolution of a tier of artwork involving Ms. Megaton Man, Preston Percy, Yarn Man, Rex Rigid, and Megaton Man himself. It began in April as a blue pencil sketch in my sketchbook, subsequently tightened with graphite pencil, then expanded with the addition of another panel, then inked and composited digitally. Each step is explained in the images below:

Blue Col-Erase pencil version in my 11" x 14" sketchbook (bonus: the scanner caught a stray piece of paper on Ms. Megaton Man's left lower leg!). Dialogue is added in pencil. In a flashback sequence, Ms. Megaton Man is being tested in the Megatropolis Quartet's laboratory. Judging from Preston Percy's hair, this probably takes place not long after the events depicted in Pteranoman #1 (1989).

Here the blue pencil is tightened with an H or HB graphite pencil.

The figure of Rex Rigid seemed somewhat cramped in the original composition, so I used tracing paper to draw the character independently, and inked it on Clearprint Design Vellum using a Hunt #102 crowquill and India ink.

Here I've lettered (using a 2.5 and 3.5 Rapidograph) and inked the rest of the composition, virtually unchanged from the original sketchbook layout, on Clearprint Design Vellum (actually, I scanned the sketchbook and printed it out at the same size). I used a repositionable gluestick (Elmer's) to adhere the vellum to the printout as I inked, later removing the adhesive with a rubber cement pick-up.

An additional panel suggested itself with Megaton Man entering the scene. Here are the pencil and inked versions.

The final tier is composited digitally. What will the remaining 2/3 of the page look like? Stay tuned!

Robots of Futures Past!

Here's an ink sketch I unearthed recently, probably from just before or after the year 2000. As you can see, the three robots are based on relatively basic, primitive geometric shapes and simple, abstract conceptions of the human skeleton, so perhaps I started it as a demonstration for one of my many cartooning workshops I was holding around Pittsburgh in those days. Since Ms. Megaton Man will be battling robots in a storyline I'm currently toying with, I may refurbish and repurpose these fellows to give our heroine something to kick the crap out of!

Pen and ink on Strathmore 400 Drawing 11" x 14", © Don Simpson 2014, all rights reserved.

Near Future Now: Looka That Architecture!

Ms. Megaton Man travels to the near future in this sequence from a storyline I am working on.

The grey portion is a photocopy of a sketch from August 2012 that I wanted to develop further.

Ms. Megaton Man Takes a Holiday!

Here are the pencils and inks of a couple of Ms. Megaton Man poses inked today (Memorial Day). The pencils are from April 2014.