Having proved myself with Malibu on the short stories, my next assignment was to ink the second and third issues of The Men in Black : Book II.
Download The Men in Black Book II PDF. You’ll enjoy it more if you read the blog post first.
When I tell non-comics people that I did comics at one point, I invariably lead with this because it’s the comic that was eventually made into a couple of popular movies, and so it’s probably something they’ve heard of. They ask me if I made a lot of money because it was made into a movie. “No,” I say in a gravelly voice looking off to the horizon with a blank but soulful stare, “I was just the inker. Just the inker.” Crap, even Sandy Carruthers, the penciller, had to pay his way to see the premiere in Hollywood. But he was – damn his eyes – invited. I found out about the film like most people: I saw the ads on TV.
And while we’re on the subject, working in comics never got me laid. I’m a pretty straight-up guy and when I was younger and went out hunting, I didn’t try to wow girls by saying, “Hey, I’m a consultant,” and other dazzling pieces of misdirection. “No,” I said, “I do comic books and that doesn’t pay that well so I have a day job like a lot of other artists.” They’d blink once or twice, look at my shoes and realise that on top of being an inferior bread winner, I was probably lousy in bed as well. No, I got laid – when I did – in spite of the fact that I did comics, and they either tolerated it for the time we were together like indulging a pet that kept piddling on the carpet, or they got pissed off when I didn’t want to do something more ‘serious’ with my life. Something that actually paid money and that they could tell their friends and family about without getting that look.
The argument you could make is that I didn’t find the right woman. You’d be right. So far in this series of posts you’ve read about my bad career decisions. It is not a reach to believe I made a lot of really bad decisions in my personal life as well. More on that in a future post.
I had never inked anyone before, and this job turned out okay overall. Sandy had a more fluid style and was certainly a more accomplished drawist than I was. It was a good match. My inking was progressing rapidly and I believe I stuck pretty closely to his stuff while adding my own flourishes. I think it’s over inked in some spots and if I worked on it today I’d pull back some of the details a bit to let the art breathe. It was my first time inking and so erred on the side of “I should ink at least what is there.”
That’s my favourite panel from both issues. I can still remember delicately inking the scallops of the robe on the character’s butt. I enjoyed inking the first issue more because of the subject matter and the setting.
The second issue was set at a comic convention. I don’t know if Sandy went squirrelly pencilling all the in jokes and crowds at the convention. For my part, I remember my hand cramping pretty badly, with some of the crowd panels taking two hours apiece to do. Those pages were late, late nights.
I had hoped to include scans of the pencils, but alas, neither Sandy nor I have photocopies of them in our files. The PDF contains eight pages from each issue and are scanned from the comics.
This would be the last work I would do for Malibu. While Tom Mason offered me a mini series of my own to draw, I chose to accept a one-shot pencilling assignment from a Canadian publisher. More on that next post.
The comics were cover dated June and July 1991, with covers by Adam Adamowicz. Released under the Aircel imprint.
Up next : Pencilling Black Scorpion for Special Studio.
