“Who doesn’t love big monsters?! Well, I do, and if you do too you need to crack open this book and take in all the monster love.” – Mike Allred
WANTING TO GET PIN-UPS FROM OTHER COMICS ARTISTS
Planning to self-publish a comic book series (which would soon become “Tabloia”), I went to San Diego’s Comic-Con in 2002, (two years before I published “Tabloia’s” first issue, which included the first appearance of Doris Danger). This was the year I thought it might be a nice feature of my book if I could convince some artists to draw pin-ups of my characters and let me publish them in my books. And this was the con I began trying to meet artists and ask about this possibility. I thought it would give potential readers a reason to flip through the book of an unknown creator and maybe give it a try, but also I wanted to show a connection with comics and creators who had influenced my work, and a sort of respect for comics history. Many books have done this. Frank Miller’s Sin City. Old issues of Wolverine. Neil Gaiman did about three issues of JUST pin-ups of Sandman, and his character Death, or whoever. But it was Mike Allred’s Madman book that was a key inspiration of this for me. All his comics just bulge with his love of the medium, in my opinion, and I wanted to emulate THAT.
MIKE ALLRED
(Below, with my best friends, Mike and Laura Allred, Seattle’s Emerald City Comic-Con 2010)
After I’d met Mike Allred at the San Diego Comic-Con of 2001 (my first San Diego Con – He was sitting at a Marvel booth signing for X-Force, and I got a quick minute with him after waiting in line), I sent him a letter printed on paper and sent in the mail c/o Marvel Comics, and told him what a great artist I thought he was. At that time, Joe Quesada had brought all these great indie artists onto Marvel’s mainstream books, and Mike was now on an X-book, shaking things up in the industry. I wrote about how impressive I thought it was, that he could use such simple, thick lines, and convey so much. I never heard back. It turns out, Marvel was forwarding any emails but not physical letters.
I looked for other ways to try getting in touch, and finally put together a package and physically sent it to the PO Box that Mike had listed inside his Atomics comics, which he self-published. I sent him copies of my not-yet-published comics, and gushed what a fan I was, and inquired about commissioning a pin-up from him. This package got me a personal email from Mike.
He wrote that he really loved the monsters, but that his schedule was just too busy to do commissions. I wasn’t too disappointed, because I had just gotten a personal email from one of my very favorite comics artists.
And eventually, with some additional pestering and negotiating, we were able to make the first of two pin-ups happen.
The next time I saw him was San Diego Comic-Con 2009 – Here we are!
Since then, we’ve become best friends!
Mike truly has been supportive of my comics work, and in 2017 he and Ryan Sook and I tried to pitch a creator-owned comics project together, but we were unable to find a publisher.