COMMENTARY:
PUBLISHED DORIS DANGER BOOKS
[NOTE: I speak about a lot of different Doris Danger books in this commentary. For the complete illogically complex list of all the comics and books where Doris’s adventures were printed AND reprinted, and what’s in them, please peruse Doris Danger Publishing History]
By the time I had made (basically) this cover image (with some slight text alterations), Tabloia issues 572-576 had been released (June 2004 to June 2005), and each featured a five 5-page story of Doris Danger as a back feature. Each were written and penciled by me, and inked by Dick Ayers. In February 2006, I put out a trade paperback to collect these Doris Danger stories, Doris Danger Seeks… Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp.
I decided I wanted it to be tabloid sized, because I was a huge fan of the Marvel Treasuries from the 1970’s. I thought it would feel more like reading a comic as a kid – because you were smaller then, so the book seemed bigger. I published a 56-page, humongous 9″x13″ book that collected those five Ayers-inked stories and fifteen giant monster pin-ups from the Tabloia issues (three per issue – Mike Allred, Gene Colan, Thomas Yeates, Bill Sienkiewicz, Irwin Hasen, Sam Kieth, Los Bros Hernandez, Steve Rude, Ryan Sook, John Severin, Ramona Fradon, Tony Millionaire, and Mike Mignola), and a new six page “origin of Doris Danger” story.
Part of the reason for including the new, extra story was to bulk up the page count, and of course part of the reason was so that people who owned the Tabloia comics would still “just have to” buy this trade.
HISTORY OF GIANT MONSTER COMICS
Here’s a commentary video on Doris Danger’s Giant Monster Inspirations (Public).
So where did my book’s title come from? Here’s a quick, simplistic comics history lesson. In the 1940’s, superhero comics were huge, but by the 1950’s, people weren’t interested in superheroes anymore, and comics creators moved to different genres to try to sell books. They dabbled with war, western, comedy, funny animal comedy, romance, crime, horror, and giant monster horror, which, as far as I can tell, came from the bad 1950’s teen films about giant ants and locusts and sea creatures and such.
The original Lee-Kirby-Lieber-Ayers giant monster comics where just one of many genres published by Timely, or Atlas Comics in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, right before the hero craze came crashing back. They changed their company name to Marvel and created the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Hulk, The X-Men, the Avengers, Thor, and basically the whole Marvel Universe. Originally, the giant monster stories had appeared in books with titles like Tales To Astonish, Tales of Suspense, Journey Into Mystery, and Amazing Fantasy, but in the 1970’s, Marvel began reprinting the stories in books titled “Where Monsters Dwell,” “Where Creatures Roam,” and “Creatures on the Loose.” So I was thinking about these 1970’s titles, and about things monsters and creatures might do besides Dwell, Roam, or be on the loose. I wrote down this title for my book, “WHERE GIANT MONSTERS, CREATURES, AND MARTIANS DWELL AND CREEP AND ROAM AND STOMP”. I later shortened it to the still lengthy “Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp.” I filmed a commentary video about this HERE.
CREATION OF DORIS DANGER
During this early stage, I’d written the name, “Dirk Danger.” I did decide early on, with this project, that I wanted a character who believed in giant monsters, who would spend the series trying to prove their existence, and when I decided it would be a woman, my wife came up with the name Doris Danger.
MAKING THE PAGE
The black-and-white Pre-Edits image (at top) was my original inked drawing, hand-lettered.
I drew the image in two days, if I can trust my notes. August 28 and 29, 2005.
I can see two kinds of ink on the paper. I’m guessing I used a brush for the bulk of the page, but the window pain – I’m guessing – I colored in with a Micron 1 – which makes sense, because then I could use a ruler to get the clean lines.
PAGE LAYOUT
By the time I began drawing this image, I had done the six covers for the six stories contained in the book, and a seventh story, Muh Muh Muh (which I penciled in 2004, assuming it would be a sixth story for Dick to ink, but which never happened), and an eighth pin-up, Dabba Doo, that sat in a drawer for two years before I did anything with it (I had originally assumed, even before I did the Muh Muh Muh story, that it would be a sixth story that Dick Ayers would ink, and then I didn’t ever come up with a story, and that was the beginning of creating my “bonus splash pages” of giant monsters).
In all THOSE giant monster splashes, I left a little space for the names of the monsters, and some text for the petrified onlookers to cry out. In the old Atlas giant monster comics that my Doris Danger comics are based on, the cover of the book would often be the exact same image as the first page of the comic, which was a title page for that first story (and then there would be a couple more stories after). I decided that I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to use a scene from one of my stories for the cover, and I didn’t even want to use one of the same monsters from inside. And I decided I didn’t want to have the monster’s name, or very much text, BECAUSE I had decided on the name “Doris Danger Seeks… Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp,” and I knew that would take a lot of space. And I ALSO knew I needed to leave enough space to include names of all the great pin-up artists who I knew would be included in the book.
So looking back on the Pre-Edit page, at the top image in black-and-white, you can see I hand lettered the logo at the top. This was an important step for the layout of the page. It would help me see how much space I would have left for an actual image. You can see, based on this image, I didn’t leave enough space for all the text I wound up wanting to include at the bottom.
All this text covering the top and bottom determined how much space I would have left to draw the image. And it wasn’t a lot! It’s less than half the page! And if you scroll down that Pre-Edit page to the bottom, you can see that the published cover of Doris Danger Seeks… Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp only has that image take up about ONE THIRD of the height! Looking back, these are not good cover designs, but they’re definitely different than what a comic cover is supposed to look like.
INSPIRATION (SWIPES)
For the idea of a monster’s eye through a window, be sure not to miss the Script page.
NOT “PHOTOSHOP SAVVY”
You’ll notice the text is all different. This was before I had any of the vague, minimal “Photoshop savvy” I now flaunt. I hand-lettered the logo, then typed the rest of the text in a Word document, printed it on a piece a typing paper, cut it out, and glued it to the original art page before scanning it in.
DORIS DANGER SEEKS…WHERE GIANT MONSTERS CREEP AND STOMP
This second Pre-Edit image (middle in full-color), was the actual cover for the 9″x13″ 56-page treasury collection that was released in 2006. Wesley Ruff colored the front AND back cover, AND designed the Doris Danger logo. Wes is a friend of mine who lives in my home town of Davis CA, and we met through our mutual enjoyment of comics and wanting to get into the industry. He also moved the text around from my original black-and-white layout, picked the fonts, and altered everything accordingly.
LOGO
You’ll notice the “Salt Peter Press” logo with a stick of dynamite. The tag line was “We’re dynamite!” This was my self-publishing label, which I found to be humorous and appropriate for the theme and style of my stories. Salt peter is an ingredient in gunpowder – NOT dynamite. So we already got it wrong. It’s also something that used to be fed to prison and “insane asylum” inmates, which prevented them from getting an erection, so that no “trouble” could result. So I liked this idea of the magazine symbol being both something that helps you shoot your gun, but also ironically prevents you from “shooting” your “gun.” I liked that the symbol suggested we thought we were hot shit, but that maybe we were actually kind of flaccid and ineffectual. Limp. I used this logo for all my self-published comics, including all those first appearances of Doris Danger in Tabloia issues 572-576.
SLG Publishing
In 2009, SLG Publishing invited me to re-print all the stories of Doris Danger I’d done up to that time. The third, lowest, black-and-white Pre-Edit image is how I re-printed the image in this (bigger 96-page) (smaller 5.5″ x 8.5″) black-and-white SLG collection, Doris Danger Giant Monster Adventures. Since it was no longer a cover for a book, I chose to change some of the text to add additional gags. The book wound up containing every story of Doris Danger so far collected EXCEPT KKK-K, The Monstrosity Who Loves Climbing (ish 222), which due to space constraints, I wound up putting in Monstrosis (Doris Danger vol. 2).
The Published color image of this page is the most “ultimate” version, as the colorized version of the black-and-white SLG reprint. At the time of this writing, it has not seen print except HERE IN THIS WEB COMIC, you lucky reader, you!
Giant Monster Inspirations (Public)
SPLASH PAGE ($4 Patrons) 
