Clarissa James, Social Justice Warrior!

Update: April 11, 2020:

Here's the inking and coloring of a drawing that began as a sketch in 2018, and conceptually as something of a rueful inside joke to myself. We Ms. Megaton Man kicking the shit out of a robot. What we don't see is her tackling everything bothering me at the time, including bogus "closed-curtain" non-profits and their night-flight "Not My Presidents," white-male-supremacist Comics-Gay-Haters, and genuinely indifferent privileged assholes or all stripes, investing this image with some really positive energy. On the level of a nice drawing and colorful megahero illustration, I hope you enjoy!

Clarissa James, robot shit-kicker!

Original Post: November 16, 2018:

Let's hear it for the Social Justice Warriors - Rod Serling, Stirling Silliphant, Gene Roddenberry, Norman Lear, Larry Gelbart, Stan Lee - without whom we wouldn't have many of the historic mid-century entertainment and enduring media franchises we know and love today. (Why, if The Mighty Thor were being launched today, Dr. Don Blake would be a legal abortion provider in an under-served region of the U.S., fighting regressive politicians with reason and religious hypocrites with Norse Neo-Paganism!)

It's times like these I wish I had an inker to pass off these pencils to ...

In that spirit, Clarissa James is also a progressive activist fighting for social change - okay, she's just kicking robot ass in this pencil sketch - but she was ahead of her time in the 1980s, and is still committed to making the world a more inviting, inclusive, tolerant and loving place. If that's token suburban armchair liberalism, I find it preferable to the looks-like-me Occupy Utopia - or sterile, low-hanging fruit crass propagandistic scrawling that passes for political cartooning these days - or the phony-populist Redneck separatist extremes on tap today. We've got to first imagine a better world before we can realize one, and that should be art and entertainment's laudable if humble goal.

(And I'm keeping a Blacklist of anyone associated with Comicsgash - they will never work on Ms. Megaton Man, Social Justice Warrior or any of the Megaton Man or Bizarre Heroes universe titles!)

Read the YA prose Ms. Megaton Man™ Maxi-Series! New chapter every Friday!

All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures are ™ and © Don Simpson 2020, all rights reserved.

Cape Catch-Up: CJ Soars!

This sequence from the all-new fifth issue of Megaton Man: Return to Megatropolis (which I plan to release as a graphic novel, not individual issues, publication details TBD) features Clarissa James, Ms. Megaton Man (who has the distinction of having the most nicknames of any of my characters -- Missy, Sissy, CJ) coming to the rescue of the beleaguered Man of Molecules. I began penciling this sequence in summer 2015, and finished in February 2016. Some adjustments were made, primarily on tier 4A, in which I altered the background. (More previews over on the Megaton Man blog!)

Light blue Col-Erase and graphite pencil (with some Pilot Razorpoint pen) on bond layout, 11" x 14".

Original figure with background penciled in; the action in the background, however, no longer seemed appropriate considered the way the preceding tiers worked out.

New background penciled today!

Foreground and background fused together in Photoshop. The tiers will be inked on Clearprint Design Vellum over printouts of the roughs.

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.