CHANGE OF ARTIST ON JURASSIC MAN
Simon decided, with great regret, that time was really against him on the story and therefore he could not continue drawing Jurassic Man. This was a very brave decision on his part because I know he was really into the story but I totally respect and understand why he felt he had to leave the strip. I really loved his take on the story and I shall miss his work and his wild SF ideas. The good news is that he’s brimful of other exciting ideas for Space Warp – on publicity and social media, for instance – so I’m looking forward to working with him on other aspects of the comic. I still regard him as very much part of the Space Warp team.
The new artist for Jurassic Man has been found and I’ll be announcing him and putting up his concept art very shortly. He, too, is an absolute natural for the story as you will see.
But drawing a story with rampaging dinosaurs, Liverpool in the 1970s, punks,a strange scientist hero, and a shoplifting Futant who travels in time and space is no easy task! So Space Warp has been very lucky to find two such fantastic artists who were up for it!
Hi Pat,
Well, I’ll be supporting it, whoever you’ve found. Stuff like Space Warp is a bold endeavour.
I’m a very casual comics fan (I only read old and, very occasionally, new 2000ads) so might be talking crap, but I read an anecdote once that Mike McMahon was so burned out by drawing scripts which included descriptions of tens of thousands of Mega Cits (in ‘Block Mania’ – the forerunner to ‘The Apocalypse War’) that he stopped drawing Dredd.
Now I think about it, that sounds like Tharg bullshit for why their rubbish page-rates and no rights policy screwed the comic for decades, by losing key contributors. I now also remember one Prog, where Brian Bolland was quoted as saying he’d stopped drawing Dredd because he was starting to forget how to draw people’s elbows, because of the Mega City fashion of pads everywhere.
In retrospect, Tharg was, evidently, taking the piss out of his readers almost as much as his contributors.
Thanks, Andrew. You make some very valid and useful points. Artists do burn out – it happens much more often than is publicly acknowledged. And writers, too. Because the financial package just isn’t very good and, as less and less stories seem to be collected and albumised these days, that is also becoming a real problem. Certainly for me on some (not all ) of my stories. If work you are proud of isn’t collected for maybe five years or never, then WTF is the point? But if a creator co-owns the rights to their character, burn out is far less likely because they control and are invested in their hero’s future
I’m so impressed by the quality of the artists on Space Warp and their enthusiasm for the creator-owned project and much of it is because they haven’t been ground down or disillusioned by an antiquated 20th century system which doesn’t reward creators properly. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted fresh new artists for Space Warp. The new Jurassic Man artist’s work is a case in point. He’s drawn three superb concept art pages – full of energy and imagination – and I’m just waiting for the fourth. I’ll probably get it this forthcoming week. Well worth a look when they appear.