cwisnia

At Joshua Tree National Park, Southern California, in Mar 2017, Chris Wisnia discusses meeting Dick Ayers and deciding to make a Jack Kirby style parody comic of GIANT MONSTERS.  (Apologies for all the wind! Click the “C.C” – closed captioned – button, so you don’t miss a word!)

 COMMENTARY:

Color by Chris Wisnia. Inks by DICK AYERS!

THE FIVE PAGE STRUCTURE

Doris Danger’s stories began as somewhat of an exercise, when I was only an aspiring comics creator. I’d spent a lot of time doing portfolio reviews, and Alex Sinclair gave me a review at a DC booth at my first San Diego Comic-Con in 2001. He recommended I try doing some stories in a four page format, because it’s not a big commitment (for an editor to look over, or for me to write and draw it), but it will show editors my quality of artwork, my storytelling technique, and my narrative understanding.

This sounded like a fun format to play with, because I’d always been trying to pitch three or seven issue stories, so I did a few stories with a couple characters I’d been mulling over.

I brought these samples to San Diego in 2002, but this time, I didn’t wait in line for portfolio reviews. I was tired of getting rejections from publishers, and had decided by then to try to self-publish my work.

INCLUDING GIANT MONSTER PIN-UPS

I thought it might be a nice feature of my book if I could convince some artists to draw pin-ups of my characters and let me publish them in my books. It would give potential readers a reason to flip through the book of an unknown creator and maybe give it a try, but also I wanted to show a connection with comics and creators who had influenced my work, and a sort of respect for comics history. Mike Allred’s Madman book was a key inspiration of this for me. All his comics just bulge with his love of the medium, in my opinion.

MEETING DICK AYERS

Here’s a commentary video on Meeting Dick Ayers.

Dick Ayers was at the con, and was one of the few artists who gave me his contact info when I asked if he’d do a pin-up of one of my characters.

On the trip home I started fantasizing, because it didn’t seem achievable, about all the artists I thought it would be just impossibly cool to somehow find and get pin-ups from. And then, in a flash of dazzling clarity, I had this crazy idea, and it made me literally jittery at the thought of it. I couldn’t sit still, and had to get up and pace around for a while.

HATING JACK KIRBY

Here’s a commentary video on Hating Jack Kirby.  When I was young, I would look at Jack Kirby’s comics and think, This guy can’t draw! He has no understanding of anatomy. All his women look like barrels. Why is everything so shiny? And if I accidentally bought a comic and got it home and realized Jack Kirby drew it, I’d be livid that I’d wasted my money.

But after college, when I started looking at comics again, I started thinking. Well, I enjoy abstract art. And I learned that photo-realism isn’t everything. There are other aspects of art besides its photo-realism. Other aspects of realism, for that matter. And I began to look at Kirby with new eyes, and realized just how much ENERGY every single line conveys to every panel, and suddenly thought it was actually the best comics work ever!

GIANT MONSTER COMICS

Here’s a commentary video on The Old 1970’s Marvel Reprints  ($7 Patrons).

So of all the comics out there, even of all the Jack Kirby comics out there, there’s just something magical for me about those Kirby giant monster stories. The strange, humongous, awkward anatomy, square-fingered, lumpy creatures with their weird flat teeth and finger nails and scales and bumps and hair and piercing eyes, wearing underpants … I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t get enough of them. And there were so many of these stories!

So knowing Dick inked  tons of this work, and now having his contact info, I fantasized, hey, if I tried to write a energetically Stan Lee-style giant monster story, and then drew it in a Kirby style … wouldn’t it be just absolutely amazing, if just maybe … Dick would ink it for me.

I timidly wrote the legendary “Darlin’ Dick” Ayers, and he was totally up for inking a five-page story. I couldn’t believe it. I got to work. And in two weeks I’d written, penciled, lettered, and put in the mail “Spluhh … The Thing who burst from an exploding volcano!”

PRELIMINARY SKETCHES

I don’t tend to do preliminary sketches, or much work in sketch books. What little I’ve done of them, I find when it’s time to apply the studies to the comics pages, I just copy the sketch into the work as best as I can, and then it’s time consuming to try and capture what I achieved in the sketch, which I often can’t, and then I duplicate the same mistakes but lose the energy of the original.

However, I did find a mere ONE PAGE of prep work sketches for this project. See the first image in the Pencils link.  It’s got a dozen monster faces – none drawn in a Kirby style, but just positioning different eyes and mouths, and then three body shots – two are just sketches of monster postures, and one is Spluhh, basically, how he looks on page 2, but a little squarer and less fluid. The second Pencils image is a close-up of this first Spluhh image.

The third Pencils image is the actual page, before Dick inked it.  I copied my three inch sketch of Spluhh onto an 11″x17″ Bristol sheet. I went over my notes, chose an island as the setting (because I thought it would make a good splash, and so I could have a volcano erupt at the story’s climax). Then I flipped through all my comics and found stories that took place in a tropical setting, copied natives in peril, palm trees, and Oceanside cliffs.

Here’s a clear example of some “swiping”:

This image is the cover to Monsters on the Prowl 27 (Marvel Comics, 1973), which was a reprint of Amazing Adventures 6 (Atlas Comics, 1961).  Notice the cliff at the bottom, with waves splashing up and little people in peril.

I had already come up with plenty of monster names (Here’s a commentary video about Naming Giant Monsters ($7 Patrons)), so I picked one from my list. Then I made up a slogan, and some natives-in-fear text, shouting the name “Spluhh”, and that was that.

TWO MONSTERS??

If I can trust my memory, my initial idea was to have two monsters on this first cover, but my mind’s eye wasn’t making very good use of the space of the page as I penciled it out, and I ran out of room, and THAT’S why there is only one monster. I can’t remember if the thought was to have two slime monsters, or two different kinds of monsters (which I did for CHAPTER FOUR’S SPLASH).  I suspect based on how the story developed into possibly more than one monster hiding in the cave, that it would have been two slime monsters.  But this concept disappeared early, since I drew the cover BEFORE scripting the story.

SIGNED, “WISNIA AND AYERS”

I thought it was funny to have a soldier pointing in shock at my signature. You’ll notice this page is signed “Wisnia and Ayers.” I told Dick I wanted the pages signed this way, and when I drew up a contract for him to ink the story, it actually stated as a condition that the story would be signed “Wisnia and Ayers.” The reason this was so important to me was that the Atlas giant monster stories were signed “Kirby and Ayers.”

I asked Dick about those signatures once in an email, and he told me when he got the pages to ink, he never knew who wrote them, but he always knew Kirby drew them, so he would sign both their names to the pages.

My original page is actually signed “Wisnia and Dick Ayers,” so I actually edited Dick’s signature.

It was always part of the page’s composition to add the “originally presented” blurb at the bottom, because the seventies Kirby-Ayers reprints always had these. And as I said, I’d planned to pretend my fictitious magazine had been running for decades.

You’ll notice I dated the original issue 1953. When I later showed my story to Kurt Busiek (at the A-1 Comics – Roseville, CA – Store Signing 2004 – pictured below, photo courtesy of the Nice Guys www.theniceguycomic.com), he said, “But you got your dates wrong.”

He was right. I thought that the giant monster stories had come out throughout the fifties. But when I found out they were early 60’s, I left the ’50’s concept, explaining that all Doris Danger’s exploits had happened throughout the fifties. I even had editor Rob Oder address this issue on a letter on page 55. And this is a technique I used regularly. Whenever I did something wrong, whether purposely or accidentally, or felt insecure about something, I would have an angry fictitious reader call attention to it on a letters page and have Rob make flimsy excuses about it.

The Pre-Edits image is how the page first appeared in “Tabloia Weekly Magazine #572 (Doris Danger’s first appearance), the self-published reprint, “Doris Danger Seeks … Where Giant Monsters Creep and Stomp,” and for a third time in the SLG book, all of them black-and-white.  The colored, Published version, ironically has never seen print.  I colored the image for a sign I had made, that I took to conventions to have at my table.

 

Here is a detail from a sketchbook page that shows my first drawing of “Spluhh, the Thing who Burst from an Exploding Volcano!” It’s from the only page of a dozen mostly-very-loose preparatory sketches I did before diving straight into creating the published pages for Doris Danger, which Dick Ayers inked.

Below this detail is the full page of this first and only prelimary sketch work I did, before just jumping in and drawing direct-on-the-page, the Doris Danger comics that were published. Notice the head sketches were really not Jack Kirby looking at all. They were my early studies for creating Kirby-style monsters, but not in style – in exploring head shapes, eye and mouth and fur or horn placement.  Kirby made so many great giant monsters, I was looking for “the magic one” for my story and just quickly jotted down with a stream-of-conscious head-eyes-mouth exercise. You can see I started with a sort of Gossamer from Bugs Bunny (see below). After zipping out a number of these quick, experimental head shapes, at the bottom right-most head of the page, it looks like I landed on something I liked – the big eyes and “ooh” mouth. I immediately did one fully realized Kirby-style sketch which would become Spluhh in my first story. At the bottom left. I wrote “Where Monsters #2,5 Taboo for globbiness.” At the time I began this project, the only references I had to Jack Kirby’s 1950’s-1960’s GIANT MONSTER comics were the 1970’s reprints by Marvel, in such comics as Where Monsters Dwell, Where Creatures Roam, and Creatures on the Loose. I flipped through my stack of these, and noted a globby monster named Taboo in issues two and five. My Spluhh monster is really very much just a swipe of Taboo.

Sorry to disappoint you, fans!  This isn’t so much a script as a reminiscence of what went through the envisioning of what the cover would be.  i.e., Where the image was swiped from.  The obvious source is this:

Above: The Brute that Walks, page Seven, Panel Two, originally printed in Journey into Mystery #65 (1961, Atlas Comics, which later became Marvel Comics), drawn by the great Jack Kirby, the King of Comics.  It was reprinted in 1970 in Where Creatures Roam #1 (Marvel Comics).  I had a small stack of these 1970’s reprints of these late 1950’s-early 1960’s comics, and while writing and drawing my Doris Danger comics, I flipped through them for my “inspiration” (swipes).  Notice in my version, I wrote “After the King.”  This is in reverence, deference, and acknowledgement of my parody and homage of Jack Kirby’s work.  I regularly post in the comics as well, my acknowledgement of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s “Atlas Comics” giant monster work, in addition to a suggestion of buying these classic quaint compendiums. And I do so now as well!

The Brute that Walks was a scientist who drank a potion he had concocted, hoping it would make him more manly, because his girlfriend thought he was a wimpy science nerd.  It turned him into a humongous ape creature.  The Kirby image above, in my opinion, is “inspired” (swiped) from THIS famous movie scene:

Above: King Kong (1933, directed by Merian C. Cooper).

In the 1970’s, right at the same time Marvel was reprinting these 1960’s Kirby monster comics, DC was releasing a lot of horror comics, most of them (the ones I enjoyed most) with covers signed LD.  These covers invariably had images of people who had no clue of a situation they were in, but WE saw the horror and terror right behind them, just out of their view.

I loved these pretty obvious, kinda cornball “shocking twists,” and the amount of story these “right-before-the-instant” images conveyed.

Stan Lee, writing the Giant Monster stories with Kirby for Atlas, has commented about including what he called “Henry James” style twist endings to his stories.  So for example, in The Brute That Walks story above, the scientist turned into a giant monster trying to make himself manly so that his girl friend wouldn’t think he was a wimp, then he went after his girlfriend and scared her, because he was a giant monster now, and then he turned back into a man, and his girlfriend said, You’re so manly for saving me from that giant monster.  “Gasp! What a twist!”

They’re both enjoyable in their way, but I probably enjoyed the twists of the DC comics covers better than the stories of Stan Lee, so I cheated my genre a bit, by swiping the language of giant monsters and the art style of Jack Kirby, but the twist-style of DC covers – for THIS cover, which you can see if you click the “Published” link below.

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!

INTRO   Chpt. 1

Giant Monster Inspirations (Public)
SPLASH PAGE ($4 Patrons) 

Chris Wisnia visits Eagle Falls near South Lake Tahoe CA (where he grew up), to talk about the Altas Giant Monster comics by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, that influenced his Doris Danger comics. Apologies for the shakiness of the image – It was COLD out there, and he had trouble holding the camera still while shivering!

 

NOTE: videos listed “Public” are free for EVERYONE to enjoy!
All the other videos are available to my kind $7 Patreon supporters!)

Doris Danger’s Publishing History (page ooo)  (Public!)
– Chris’s home in sunny Davis, CA

Meeting the artist, Shag (page ooo) (Public!)
– Mount Shasta, CA

Chronology in Doris Danger Comics  (page 000b)
– San Diego, CA

Creation of Rob Oder, fictitious editor  (page 000b)
– Valley of Fire State Park, in Overton, NV

Mimicking the retro art style  (page 000c)
– Somewhere on Hwy 87??, SD

GIANT MONSTER inspirations (page 001) (Public!)
– Eagle Falls near South Lake Tahoe, CA

Meeting Dick Ayers and Deciding to Make Doris Danger Comics  (page 002) (Public!)
– Joshua Tree, Southern CA

Hating Jack Kirby (page 002) 
– Grand Canyon, NV

The Old 1970’s Marvel Reprints  (page 002)
– Tahquitz Canyon, Palm Springs, CA

Naming Giant Monsters  (page 002)
– Meatpacking District, Manhattan, NY

Doris Danger’s name  (page 003)
– Bryce Canyon, UT

Doris’s VERY first appearance  (page 003)
– Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, D.C.

Three Star Army Generals  (page 003)
– Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Doris Danger’s Story Format  (page 004)
– First draft and alternate take: Laguna Beach, Southern CA
– Second draft, Griffith Observatory, Hollywood Hills, Southern CA

No Men in Black (page 004)
– Upper Falls of Yellowstone Park

Toxic Gasagina   (page 004)
– Norris Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, WY

Monster Liberation Army and G.I.Joe  (page 005)
– National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.

Monster Liberation Army and the A-Team (page 005)
– French Quarter, New Orleans, LA

Lettering by Hand (page 006)
– Shasta Lake, Northern CA

Fezzies (page 006)
 – Apple Hill, CA

Any Crazy Thing (page 006)
– Gibbon Falls, Yellowstone National Park, WY

Cramming in the Monster Names (page 007)
– Whitney Museum Outdoor Patio, New York City, NY

“Originally Published in Issue Number” (page 007)
– Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.

In “Africa” (page 007)
– Yellowstone National Park, WY

Childhood Comics Chronologies (page 008)
– Chris’s studio, Davis, CA

The Stan Lee Writing Style  (page 008)
– along the I-70, UT

Unmasking Robots (page 011)
– Lower Falls, Yellowstone National Park, WY

Eiffel Tower (page 012)
– New York, NY

Humanoid Shaped Monsters (page 012)
– Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.

Felk’s “Get Me” (page 013)
– North Lake Tahoe, NV

Felk’s Look (page 013)
– Yellowstone National Park, WY

Giant Monster Size (page 015)
– Battery Park, Manhattan, NY

Brainstorming Giant Monster Names (page 024)
– Andreas Trail, Indian Canyon, Palm Springs, CA

Preaching Peace (and Riots) (page 025)
– the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.

Telling not Showing (page 026) (Public!)
– Bryce National Park, UT

Asterisks and Footnotes (page 028)
– Sunny Davis, CA on a foggy morning

Generic, Uninformed, Exotic Settings (page 032)
– National Botanical Gardens of Washington, D.C.

Exotic Splash Pages (page 032)
– Zion National Park, UT

Exotic Settings Inspired by Hollywood (page 032)
– near Vernal Falls, Yosemite, CA

Exotic Settings NOT like Hollywood (page 032)
– Yosemite Valley, CA

MLA’s unshocking surprise appearances  (page 033)
Takes One and Two
– Cape Mendocino, CA

Inks His Own Stories (page 037)
– Somewhere West of Cody, WY

Alan Moore’s Letters Pages (page 043)
– Washington, D.C., Overlooking the White House and Washington Monument

Alan Moore’s Letters Page Influence, Continued (page 043)
– San Francisco, CA

Christian Tracts (page 046)
– Ashland, OR

Dr. Souseman (or Mondell Klute) (page 057)
– along the Mississippi River in New Orleans, LA

At last, we meet Dr Souseman…again (page 057)
– St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Sacramento CA

Hillbillies and the Jefferson Memorial (page 057)
– Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Hillbillies – Their Politics, Their Goals (page 057)
– Central Park, New York, NY

Luke Luggash’s first appearance (page 059)
– 10,000 feet above sea level in Yellowstone National Park

The MuhMuhMuh Outer Space Story (page 074)
– Badlands National Park, SD

Doris Danger goes to Outer Space (page 075)
– Ol’ Faithful, Yellowstone National Park, WY
– plus BONUS Ol’ Faithful Geyser footage, Yellowstone National Park, WY

Outer Space, Robots, and ACTORS! (page 076)
– under Yosemite Falls, Yosemite, CA

Changing the title to “Monstrosis” (V2, page 000)
– Cancun, Mexico

written as 1-3 page sequences (V2, page 000)
– Jones Bar, outside Nevada City, CA

Doris Danger’s last comic book (V2, page 000)
– at the site of the 1878 fires of goldrush-era Shasta, CA

Subway Monsters (V2, page 035)
– deep down in the subways of New York City

Monsters Under Bridges (V2, page 036-037)
– at the site of the 1878 fires of goldrush-era Shasta, CA

Not Harry Potter (V2, page 152) (Public!)
– Los Angeles, CA

Jack Kirby’s Rushed Errors (V3, page 3-006 and 3-007)
– Mt. Rushmore, SD

Parachute Sequence (V3, page 3-008)
– Somewhere West of Cody, WY

Steve Ditko style pages (V3, page 3-020)
– Black Sands Beach in Whitethorn, CA

The Last 39 pages of Doris Danger vol. 3 (Apr 2019)
– Chris’s home in sunny Davis, CA

Get a Closer Look at the Last 39 pages! (Apr 2019)
– Chris’s home in sunny Davis, CA

The Last 39 pages – UPDATE! (Jun 2019)
– Chris’s home in sunny Davis, CA

Get a SECOND, NEW, CLOSER Look at the Last 39 pages! (Jun 2019)
– Chris’s home in sunny Davis, CA

NOTES: back cover for Doris Danger Seeks… Where Urban Creatures Creep and Stomp! Salt Peter Press, 2007, 64 pages, black and white, 9″x13″.  Cover image by Shag