DORIS DANGER!

My best friend, George Tuska

In my earliest years as a published comics artist, I spent a lot of time looking online at what conventions were happening each year and choosing ones to participate in. All our choices with deciding on what conventions to show at were strategically decided on, based on who the special guests would be.  I was really excited about Orlando’s Mega Con in 2006, because there were a lot of guests I was excited to meet, who I didn’t ever see coming out to my local West Coast shows.

I couldn’t wait to meet George Tuska and Al Feldstein at this one. I knew George must be getting on in his years, because I heard he’d been doing comics since the 1940’s. It turns out, he was ninety at this show! So I really wanted to see him. I suspected he didn’t get out to many conventions, although I noticed he was at MegaCon the year before.

We set up our table, and Elizabeth, as usual, gave me time to walk around and try to talk with everyone. I couldn’t find George Tuska. I spoke to the staff toward the end of the show and learned he had to cancel his appearance at the con, because he had cut his foot, and then he got a staff infection. I was really disappointed knowing I wouldn’t have this opportunity to meet him, since he was one of the great excitements for me, coming to this con.

Upon returning home, I emailed MegaCon to see if they could help me get in touch with him. They were so helpful, and said they forwarded my info on to him. They then got his permission to pass his phone number to me.  They let me know he had recovered from his foot injury

I tried calling multiple times over a week or so, before finally getting his wife on the phone. She said that George was deaf, so I should speak with her.  I told her about my comics project, and she said George would make a pin-up for me. The pin-up came in the mail very quickly, and I was so pleased that for the next few years I’d fantasized about getting another from him, but he passed away in 2009. I was sad I never had an opportunity to meet him face-to-face, but grateful for this pin-up, which I finally published six years after receiving it, in Monstrosis (Doris Danger vol. 2, SLG Publishing) in 2012.

My best friend, George Tuska, made fun comics!   He passed away in 2009.  Pick up nice hardcover reprints of his runs on Iron Man or Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, at your local comics shop !

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My best friend, Nick Cardy

In 2006, my wife Elizabeth and I got a table at the Orlando Mega-Con.  There were a bunch of artists at the show whom I was excited to meet. This was a year I was spending a lot of time going to conventions and hunting down favorite artists in the hopes of getting them to draw a giant monster for me, that I could publish in my Doris Danger comics. Nick Cardy wasn’t an artist I was very familiar with at the time, but I knew he was well respected, and he was doing sketches at the show.

He  asked if I was a fan of his my work, and I told him, I wasn’t that familiar with what he’s done.  He had a book of his work and let me flip through it, as he named some of his credits, including hundreds of covers he’d done that I even owned a bunch of and had in long boxes at home. So I realized I actually WAS familiar with his work, I just didn’t know the name to go with it. How embarrassing!

I showed him my Doris Danger treasury, which was recently self-published, and he flipped through it. At the back were a dozen pin-ups by other artists, and I was impressed that he knew so many of them, old and new. This was someone from the seventies era who kept up to date on his artists.

When I asked him about doing a pin-up for me, he said to come back later, to give him time to think about it. I came back, and he said he was busy, and there were sketches ahead of me that he had to do. Come back later. When I came back again, he was gone.

We bumped into him at breakfast the next day. He said, I’m still thinking about that pin-up. At the convention he had said how the scariest things are things you can’t really see, except maybe a hint of it creeping out from the darkness or something. He asked me if something like that would be all right. Absolutely. I checked in later, and there were other pin-ups ahead of mine, but he was still thinking about it, he said. On Sunday, the final day of the show, he whipped out the piece he’d done.  I was shocked how similar it was to Ojo [a book I was literally working on at that time, created by Sam Kieth].

(Photo, left: With my best friend, Nick Cardy, at Mega-Con Orlando 2006)

In the past, I would meet and get contact info from artists, then commission them by email, and they would make a piece for me in their spare time, and then send it in the mail. I had mixed feelings about convention sketches – drawn at the convention – as pin-ups in my book, because of course the artists don’t necessarily use their best tools, and the conditions aren’t great for drawing, and most likely they’re pounding out a lot of sketches, and not necessarily able to put in the time and quality they might do working in their comfortable, usual working areas with all their comfortable, usual tools.  That was my perception. So this was the first one I received that I published. But later I began realizing that artists draw just fine, wherever and whenever and with whatever. So I began collecting more this way for publication.

In 2007, Nick came to Wondercon, and I was able to snap this photo with him (right: with my best friends, Nick, Sergio Aragones, and Gene Colan). Nick’s pin-up was published in Monstrosis (Doris Danger vol. 2, SLG Publishing) in 2012.  This was the last time I saw him.  He passed away in November 2013.

My best friend, Nick Cardy, made gorgeous comics!  He won the 2005 Will Eisner Hall of Fame award for all his great DC comics covers of the 1970’s. He passed away in 2013.  Pick up nice hardcover reprints of his Aquaman and Teen Titans runs, at your local comics shop !

Chpt. 13   CHPT. 13a   CHPT. 14
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With reverence and admiration for, and in loving parody of, the Atlas GIANT MONSTER comics of Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Larry Lieber, whose comics you should buy!