Aborted Frazetta piece & the original Mr. Gone...

A while back I was asked to do some Frazetta comics, but I was reluctant. We already have a Frazetta and he's a hell of an artist to live up to. The publisher assured me he and Frank didn't want artists to just copy this style... 


So, I tried a few pencil sketches... 

Then tried to paint the Death Dealer too. But it soon became clear that, especially with my limitations as a painter, I was in over my head. I was just wasting time trying to be anybody else except me. Some artists might pull it off, but I missed the mark. I had to find my own style. But failure's always the best  way to figure out what you don't look like. At least for me it was. That's why I shared these. 

I also threw these pieces up because, like tons of other artists, I really respect Frazetta's technic and compositional skills, and was sad to hear of his passing. I never got to meet him, but his influence was felt on TONS of artists. 


Had we ever met, I'd like to hope he'd have told me that  I was better off being myself too. 


Here's something else kinda odd. I forgot that, before Mr. Gone was a skinny pencil-headed guy, his name was 'Bill' in this layout. I used this same layout for another story where I re-named him Milo, with the same face. But this was the original on an ugly yellow note pad. 

Maxx would have been a totally different series if Mr. Gone looked like this, eh?  Back then Julie was called 'Pam' but looked the same, more or less. It was all still slowly forming together in the old days. 

You'll see all this crap in some of the art books I have coming out later. Of course the Trout was in there too, lying dormant in old musty sketch books, as magical Trouts usually do. 

And just for fun, here's an old Ojo brush and ink by the astounding Alex Pardee. He drew this sucker back when he was helping me out with the Ojo comics years ago. Nobody draws weird creatures crap quite like Alex, eh? Yeah, I know, I stupidly taped the page, leaving some brown stuff on it... but if I peeled it up now, it'd rip the ink off. * sigh * 


Okay, until next week...