I drew this pin-up of Doris Danger on 6/29/05, after I’d been publishing her adventures for some time. If you look at it closely, you may see that when I designed it, the thought was, I like how Doris Danger looks in her very first story, in Tabloia #572,the first panel of Page 004 – holding that camera up. So I’m going to draw a picture of her like that, but more detailed, larger. The idea of a pin-up like this had been planted in my head when a friend at San Diego Comic-Con asked me to draw a sketch of Doris Danger for him, and this was the image I chose. So now it was later, and I redrew the image in much greater detail as this pin-up, and with the purpose of it being the back cover for Doris Danger Seeks…Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp (treasury-sized trade paperback, 2006). My best friend, Wesley Ruff colored it for the back cover. When SLG collected all my self-published Doris Danger stories, I published the image in black and white, as the inside front cover of Doris Danger Giant Monster Adventures.
Around this time, I had a lot of brainstorming excitement about pin-ups that I could draw for this series. The first that comes to mind is the kind of thing Stan Lee was having his artists do in the back of his earliest (1960’s) Marvel comics – An exciting bonus pin-up of this super hero or this villain, with a paragraph about who they are, and listing the issue they first appeared in, and often a handwritten signature “by the superhero.”
But of course these pin-ups above (all drawn by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko) reference an older pin-up for grown-ups – the ACTUAL pin-ups for the army kids sent overseas, who cut out a photo of a famous starlet blowing a kiss, with her name signed over the shot, as if it’s personalized. I love the idea that these war vets were looking at pin-ups of beautiful women and longing or fantasizing for them while they’re in foreign places and could die later that day, and little boys back home are cutting out pin-ups of – not icky girls PTHOOIE! – their favorite super heroes to put in their lockers or on their desks and remind them who they love the most. Here are closer resemblances to “actual” pin-ups that I’m talking about, but again for the comics fans (both again by Jack Kirby):
I had these big dreams of drawing pin-ups of Doris, or of posters with a clump of her with all her cast of characters (like Matt Groening did for the Simpsons).
I had big dreams of drawing giant monster scenes with a bunch of the ones I’d created all in one image, destroying one big city. Early on, I had a dream of drawing a bunch of giant monsters wreaking havoc on San Diego, and then printing posters to sell at San Diego’s Comic-Con. None of this ever happened, but you never know if one day I’ll get around to it.
