This is the cover to Untamed #1. The character, Griffin, was one of two main characters, and he was a 'bad cop', in this futuristic crime story. Note: when inventing this character, I wanted to give him a little more bling; I had the brainstorm of adding stuff to his beard. So I twisted in some jewelry, fishhooks, anything to make it a little interesting. I'd never seen anyone put items/jewelry into beards before, so it was an original idea. Did I invent it? I dunno, probably someone somewhere had already done it before me. Just sayin'. Untamed was a 3-part series I wrote and drew. The three books were published under Marvel's 'Epic' brand, which catered to creator-owned projects. My books were part of a sub-category of Epic books called the 'Heavy Hitters' line. Heavy Hitters was a brand Marvel created for a short run of creator-owned projects in the early 1990s. If you search 'Marvel Heavy Hitters' you'll see the other books and creators that were part of it. ***Edit: Okay, I tried that search, and apparently Marvel is branding some new version of Heavy Hitters with popular characters, and that's all that comes up in the search. So I tried the search 'epic heavy hitters', and that one brought up the early 1990s series of comics I'm talking about, including mine. I created all my characters, wrote, pencilled and inked all three Untamed issues. ***Special note: this was one of the very first comics that Marvel colored via computer coloring. I got all excited when they told me they'd chosen my book as part of this new experiment. Computer coloring was in its infancy here and most people had never heard of it. While the colorist's color choices were fine, I didn't like the effect of the finished computer colors. They were quite flat and simplistic. The blends and airbrushing were extremely simple and nascent. Within a few years computer companies had sorted programs out, Photoshop became widely used, and coloring was revolutionized. I guess my book 'took one for the team', ha. Untamed #1 was published in June of 1993. If you want to see what the very beginnings of computer coloring in comics looked like, check it out. Maybe someone's published a page or two of this issue online? - I haven't looked. Sorry the upper part of this original cover has water buckling. I have no idea where that came from. Back in those days, original pages weren't worth a lot of money (unless you were a 'big' creator - which I wasn't), and many of us treated them with, to put it politely, neglect. (Or maybe that was just me?) I gave tons of original pages away to friends and fans. I even rolled up a stack of them into singles, and dropped them into the Halloween bags of kids that came around Trick-or-Treating one year (I kid you not). Burned many in the fireplace another year when I was 'downsizing' (again, I kid you not). Some were stored in all kinds of bags, boxes, situations, with or without moisture, along my many, many moves. Maybe this buckling can be re-moistened and ironed out? I dunno. If anyone has a tip or trick to flatten out moisture-buckled Bristol board, I'm all ears.
Edit: yep, figured it out. Took it to a picture framers in town, who also does some art conservation. She was able to flatten it out overnight. So the water buckling is about 95% gone now. Looks much better. I'll leave the old image above instead of uploading the new flattened one, though. Too lazy to switch them out.
