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Show us your AMATEUR/HOMEMADE Bronze Age comics!!!
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33 posts in this topic

 

Long story short: due to some not-so-happy circumstances (the death of my mother), I recently--and very happily--reconnected with a childhood buddy whom I hadn't seen in quite a few years.

 

Shooting the breeze led to shooting some e-mails back and forth, and eventually we got around to talking about the homemade comic books we wrote and drew as kids, ca. 1976 - 1979.

 

Turns out that he actually saved most of his work. So...he shot a few quickie iPhone snaps, and here they are -- not the best quality, but hopefully you get the idea (i.e., that we were shameless and slavish Marvel Junkies! -- please feel free to identify the Adams-Steranko-Starlin-Gulacy-et al. swipes...'cause we already have!).

 

I remember most of these very well and very fondly. I may have helped with the dialogue and maybe some lettering on a (very) few of them (if any), but (mercifully...because I sucked as an artist!) the ideas, artwork, and storytelling are all his.

 

Even now, 35+ years later, I still think that this is exciting, exuberant, and promising work from a talented kid who was just 10-13 years old :o when these were drawn in the mid/late '70s!

 

To me at least, it looks like he was forming an embryonic version of the crude and violent but also hyper-kinetic & posed/pin-up oriented Image/"modern" house-style (minus the manga influences) 10-15 years ahead of schedule.

 

Ah...to have that much time on our hands again. All the time in the world to make our own comics, or to do nothing at all... :cloud9:

 

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I’m really sorry to hear about your mother…

 

Your friend was amazingly talented for that age. I have always drawn, up to some point, but at 12-13 I would have never been able to draw a decent realistic figure, or maybe I wasn’t just enough motivated… :)

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I’m really sorry to hear about your mother…

Thanks, Claudio. Much appreciated. It wasn't unexpected, and she wasn't in any pain, so we were all very thankful for that at least.

 

My mom was a lifelong movie and science fiction fan, starting in the mid 1930s, and loved comic books, too.

 

She was raised by her Italian grandparents (from Cirò) after her mother died very young, and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood where she was best friends with a kid whose dad was the local fruttivendolo and owned a small neighborhood store. There was a magazine rack full of comics in the shop, and the kid and my mom would get their pick to read (and sometimes to keep) for free from each new batch.

 

She was barely 12 years-old when Action Comics #1 hit the stands, but distinctly remembered reading it and most of the subsequent DC hero titles at least through 1940...

 

 

 

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Great stuff! I love the random numbering. I'm impressed you guys got past doing just a few pages and actually assembled the comics. A decade later and you could have been part of the B/W glut ;)

 

 

When I see this kind of stuff I'm reminded of Jules Feiffer's homemade Radio Comics from 1941 that he mentions ( with image) in his book The Great Comic Book Heroes.

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When I saw the topic, I thought you meant amateur or semi-pro comics that were published by fans, rather than stuff we drew ourselves.

 

I do have some stuff I drew myself somewhere, but it's more Copper Age. I'll try to dig some out.

 

But for Bronze Age, I came across this a while back at a comic shop and had to buy it - it's an amateur, self-published sci-fi/fantasy pastiche called The Books of Zomxathxia vol. 1. This was put out in 1976 by Wendy Snow, who was a regular on the comic con circuit at the time as a Red Sonja cosplayer. Through this, she met Red Sonja artist Franke Thorne, who was also into cosplay, and who apparently encouraged her to do this:

 

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She put out a second volume in 1977, which I haven't tracked down yet, though there are at least a couple copies floating around online.

 

I believe she did become a professional artist and eventually did some pro comics work almost 20 years later on a vampire comic called Night's Children.

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Here's an Avengers issue I tried to do myself.

 

This is Copper Age, but since the thread is here...

 

I drew this in early 1989. Right around the time I turned 16.

 

As you can see, I have recently elected President George H.W. Bush standing over the defeated Avengers. I had plotted out a massive storyline, something like 16 issues, involving the Space Phantom switching places with President Bush, taking over the government and conquering the world.

 

Little did I know that the person who would actually destroy the Avengers wasn't President Bush at all, but rather Brian Bendis.

 

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I have no idea why I had the Punisher on the team, as that makes no sense. I drew this shortly after #300 came out, hence my decision to make this #400.

 

As it turned out, I think my version of this issue was, in fact, better than the actual #400.

 

 

Pages 1-2: We start with Daredevil fighting Captain America in what seems to be an empty void:

 

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Pages 3-4: Turns out they are just sparring - of course, that's how every comic seemed to start at the time, a battle that turned out to be Captain America sparring with someone - but Spider-man (?!) interrupts them to tell them something major is going down.

 

And it involves an homage to Avengers #102! Only, on Hydrobase!

 

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Pages 5-6: This sequence is obviously my response to John Byrne totally crapping on and destroying the Vision in the pages of WCA because he thought that he, instead of Vision, should be shtupping Wanda.

 

I fixed this by having Wonder Man's brain patterns re-grafted into Vision's mind - a-la the way Jocasta was created in #162 - and as we can see by the smiling Vision, it totally worked.

 

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Pages 7-8: This creates a problem, though. With the Vision gone, the team is shorthanded. Luckily, it turns out that Hellcat is here, and she wants to rejoin! And even more fortuitously, I had a copy of #144 to totally swipe! Hurray!

 

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Page 8, as you can see, is just thumbnails. I have thumbnails all the way up to Page 13, but this is as far as I actually drew. Short version: The Mad Thinker attacks the team with a new version of the Lethal Legion that includes Living Laser, Taskmaster, Grim Reaper and a couple other villains whose names I didn't write down.

 

They then go into a Gardner Fox style story where they have individual battles.

Edited by Crimebuster
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From 1970 to around 1980 I drew lots of my own comics. I started drawing my own comics when I was quite young, around age 5 which was when I had bought my first comic. I started drawing in these giant scribblers: 100 page monstrous stories that made absolutely no sense at all!

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I filled 3 or 4 of these scribblers:

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I also made up several of my own characters:

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Neron Man was my longest running title, I made 15 issues and an annual.

My dad salvaged an extra long stapler and I was able to start stapling in the middle of the paper I used ( folded in half 11" x 17" )

I got a little better with each issue of Neron Man, here is some of issue 5:

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Are you sure the first two are from the 70's? 80 cent fictional cover price? the third one looks right for that timeframe. i ask because the first one style/costume-wise doesn't look like anything from the 70s, but does look like something that might have been modeled on comics coming out 5-10 years later.

 

art-wise the first two and maybe 4th are just as good as a lot of the indie stuff pumped out in the 80s by so-called adult professionals.

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Again, a lot of these, art-wise, are as good as a lot of actual 1980s indie comics. i'm impressed.

 

my homemade comics circa 1982/83 (10-11 years old) were pretty bad compared to these and were long ago tossed out.

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This cover in particular rules in so many different ways:

 

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I particularly dig the big guy with the beard and the skull and crossbones t-shirt.

 

We talk a lot about "value" around here. To me, this stuff is priceless. It all should be compiled into a gigantic swingin' '70s omnibus of homemade superhero awesomeness...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Are you sure the first two are from the 70's? 80 cent fictional cover price?

The first few images shown in my original post are from the same comic book ("The Enforcers", a team book), which dates from 1980: it's the latest one in the bunch, and probably one of the last produced (my buddy and I both gave up comics that year in favor of the usual high school distractions). All the rest are from the mid/late '70s...

 

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why does Neron man look like Nova on a steroid/HGH mix? Is the mercenary's real name Remoulade Wilson?

 

Totally honest here, both of my characters were invented before their familiar counterparts.

Neron Man was created before Nova , he just has striking resemblance.

My villain the Mercenary was invented before Deathstroke as well. I created him in 1977, the idea came from a Mego doll I had which was simply a Green Goblin body with a Spiderman head. The disc he threw re-acted like a boomerrang and returned to his hand and connected to his belt. All I can say is great minds think alike. :)

 

I was extremely creative with my Megos, re-inventing them to be other characters. I made a home made version of Mysterio melting a plastic bubble to the mego body using my dad's soldering gun. :)

I took some white fake fur like material from my Mom's bathrobe ( she was so mad I cut it out! ) and sewed it onto a black ape mego from Planet of the Apes and made the ape guy from the cover of Avengers 62.

Fun times.

 

 

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