Vampirella #5 p. 24 Finished Pencils by Jeff Jones

Jeffrey Catherine Jones became one of my favorite artists when I saw their beautiful, often haunting, paintings and drawings in the book, "the Studio." I also found myself buying numerous science fiction and fantasy novels that featured their painted covers or illustrations. However, while those paperbacks were numerous and easy to find, his comic book output was scattered among the short stories found in Warren Magazines, Charlton Comics backup stories and the occasional mystery story and rarer-still cover for DC, and were much more difficult to acquire.

Unlike their fellow Studio mates (BWS, Bernie Wrightson and M.W. Kaluta), whose comic book works were much easier to find, I had a devil of a time tracking down Jones' comic stories in comic shop back-issue bins and at comic conventions. However, I found it worth the effort.

Their early comic book work, which was heavily influenced by the E.C. Comics of their youth, and, particularly Frank Frazetta, may have been a bit crude, but when I did manage to find a book with one of their stories, I always found them fascinating. For one thing, they were much more impressionistic than most of the comic art I was used to seeing.

The page I acquired from Mike Burkey was, according to Mike's description, drawn during a short period in Jones career when they desired to keep the pencils to their comic stories intact. During this period, instead of sketching out a page, they produced very tight, finished pencils. Later, they would light box the pencils and ink them on a separate page. This method proved to be too time-consuming, and they quickly abandoned it, returning to the "normal" way of producing a comic page. This page is from one of the few stories that survived from this era.

It is the second page of the story, "An Axe to Grind", which can best be described as a macabre, elaborate traveling sales(wo)man joke. That's right, the story's protagonist is a very lovely, elegantly dressed, long-haired female who sells... lightning rods door-to-door. I imagine that she is modeled after their then wife, Louise, now more well-known as Louise Simonson. I particularly love the fourth panel, with its bird's eye view and gothic design (which they sadly covered up with screentone in the inked/printed version).

The antagonist of the story, who appears in the last panel, is a serial killer who hates traveling salespersons of either gender, and who, by stories end, will have wished he'd bought one of those darn lightning rods. Again, according to the info in Mike's description, Jones said in an interview that Bernie Wrightson assisted in drawing some of the panels in this story, though he couldn't recall which ones. To my eye, this character has a very Wrightsonesque appearance. (By no means am I claiming to be an expert, and opinions may vary.)

I have had to cut down on my collecting the last few years, but this page had been on Mike's site, beckoning to me, for a while now. While some of the other pages from the story had sold, this is the one I had my eye on as it featured those three panels of a wonderfully rendered "Jones Girl". A nice bonus is the famous boxed "J" "signature" they obviously added at a later date in the negative space on the bottom right.