Aping Mad

The first issue of Mad hit the stands 60 years ago this week — or not. I’ll get back
to that shortly.



What does this have to do with the image above, cropped from a 15-year-old drawing
of mine?

Nice Day for a Sprite Wedding

Here’s another homage/parody cover of mine for CAPA-Alpha, done around the
same time as the one I shared the other day.



This one’s much less of a straight copy, adding characters and ditching the logo. It
uses as its springboard Marvel Comics’ The Uncanny X-Men #179 — dated Mar. 1984, penciled by John Romita Jr., and inked by Dan Green. I drew it for Richard Rubenstein’s ’zine after we had a discussion about superheroes who were explicitly identified as Jewish.

Grimm Tidings

If you feel as though the blog has focused a bit more on my visual works recently,
well, it has. That’s due in part to me simply having so much fun putting together those Game of Thrones gags. But this entry is due to me going through files to get old articles entered for digital storage and eventually archived up on the Interwebs, files amongst which I’m also finding old sketches and cartoons.



The 1995 drawing above right is a mock cover to the nonexistent series Mr. K-a’s
Pal, Benjy Grimm, done for CAPA-Alpha, riffing on the cover to an issue of DC Comics’ Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, above left — dated June 1967, penciled
by Curt Swan, inked by George Klein, and lettered by Ira Schnapp.

I brainstormed the piece for/with a fellow member of CAPA-Alpha, a.k.a. K-a, Mike Valerio. Mike and this very picture were first mentioned on the blog a couple of years ago in a mishmash post shortly after his passing, while CAPA-Alpha was described in detail before that.

Mike pitched me an idea for what I recall was a month devoted to either writing about inter-company crossovers or producing intra-K-a collaborations, if not both, around the time that the big-deal DC vs. Marvel event was happening. Mike was an admirer of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby’s ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, alias Ben Grimm, of the Fantastic Four; the character’s motto “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” was at least one of Mike’s ’zine titles. He also appropriated a version of Steve Ditko’s absolutist hero Mr. A as Mr. K-a for his contributions (which is a reference that if you don’t get you’re invited to research on your own). Mike presented me with both the cover that he wanted me to copy and the cover copy — what The Thing, in place of Jimmy Olsen, would be saying plus a torrent of strident text to stuff into Mr. K-a’s mouth. I surprised Mike by drawing us in as the institution’s security guard and doctor, respectively.

Mini-Slog and Miscellany

I’m sitting outside in a lovely breeze, reminded of how wildly the weather
fluctuates this time of year — and how nice it is to sit outside in a lovely breeze.

The laptop says it’s 86° at nearly 6:30 p.m., which the stifling heat up in my bedroom reflects, but I only just realized that the storm windows probably aren’t coming down again. Hefting the air conditioner into place seems premature, though.

I’ve had a little more trouble restoring the blog after the other day’s sabotage than anticipated. Of course, I should’ve anticipated it — Blogger often doesn’t work as planned. The ability to export the entire code of your blog to your hard drive, however, makes for a decent bulwark against hackers and the service’s own glitches. Not long ago, I realized that I should be doing so regularly in addition to saving the HTML of individual posts. When my blog was vandalized Apr. 1st, the entire thing was deleted, but fortunately I’d saved the code to my laptop the night before. All the posts and even the comments were preserved; while the sidebar widgets unfortunately were not, they’re easy enough to set up. My biggest complaint by far is whatever bugs in Google
or Blogger security allowed this hackery to begin with — quite a concern since my password was total nonsense and changed frequently.

K-a Blam

I drew the picture above 15 years ago for CAPA-Alpha #362.