SOME OF MY EARLY COMIC WORK

I found a pile old comic art that I drew as a kid and thought I might share some of it here. I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion that one of my big inspirations to draw comics was an early issue of WHOOPEE! sent to me by my British pen friend Andrew. I studied and admired the art so much that I even copied it in my drawings, as confirmed by the images below. Created in 1980, they come from what I hoped would be a 36-page comic book drawn for my own and my mates’ enjoyment, with not even the remotest hope/thought of getting it published because we didn’t have comics here at the time, and I was just a kid when I drew it. Oh, and we didn’t refer to those things as ‘comics’; we called them ‘adventures’. 

Looking at it now, I think it was quite a good story idea: two Moonsters (i.e. humanoid residents of the Moon) enter for a space race around the Solar System. At the same time, three crooks steal a precious statue from the Moon Art Museum. They must deliver it to a criminal mastermind on another planet to get paid. One of the crooks, who is having second thoughts about his way of life, joins the crew of the two Moonsters who know nothing of his secret cargo that he carries hidden in a pram and hopes to deliver to the boss. The other two crooks are eager to get hold of their mate, recover the statue and claim payment for themselves... 

Sadly, other things (or new story ideas) must have come up and I only drew 8 pages of the book (up to and including the start of the race) but the general premise suggests it would have been filled with weird adventures involving space creatures, suspense, explosions and whatnot… 

As you can see, the front cover is a rip-off of World-Wide Weirdies by Ken Reid:

One of the crooks is a spitting image of Prof Cube, while another one appears to be inspired by the monstrous pilot of the spacecraft seen in the top left corner of Ken’s original World-Wide Weirdies frame. In the panels below the two ‘gangsters’ decide to blow up railway tracks to prevent the arrival of the President of the Moon and sabotage the start of the race. Prof Cube’s lookalike appears to have no hands but in truth his hands fold inside the compartment behind the little door on his belly…

The dashing news reporter in the splash panel below is obviously Frankie Stein (minus screws and bolts): 

President fires the starting pistol to signal the start of the race, and this is where the adventures end…

Anyway, the find brought back some happy memories, and I think both the story and the drawings are rather good – I was only 12 or 13 years of age then!

Let me know what you think. I have other stories to show. Many are unfinished (I was a busy kid :) ), but I have a complete 4-page comic adaptation of “The Lobster and the Lioness” – the most famous short story by Australian writer Ernest Francis "Kodak" O'Ferrall which I drew at the age of 14 or 15 in 1982. Here’s the opening panel: 

MY FIRST PUBLISHED CARTOONING WORK

If you’ve been following my blog for some time, you may be aware that years ago I used to be a freelance cartoonist and comic artist here in Lithuania. In my interview for Steve Holland's Bear Alley website that I did to promote The Power Pack of Ken Reid, I mentioned that my first published work was actually in the UK! 

Here’s the story: I started learning English since my first year at school at the age of seven. When I was in third grade, I wrote a little story in English, and presented it in the form of a small illustrated 12-page book. Each illustration occupied a full page, with text on the opposite page. I showed it to my English teacher, and she posted it to her pen friend at Shakespeare Middle School in Leeds. A few months later my teacher gave me a copy of the 1978 Autumn edition of the School’s magazine with my story printed in full! I think they were impressed with the effort of a young non-native speaker from the other side of the Iron Curtain…

A few days ago I found the magazine in my archive. Here are the front and back covers - the latter looks a bit like a Creepy Creation by Ken Reid, don’t you think?

My little story is in the two images below. It even has a slap-up feed panel at the end! Considering I was only 9 or 10 years of age when I wrote it, and had only been studying English for some 3 years, the language isn’t too bad… The story was printed in black and white, and the print quality was rather poor, so my 10 year old self must have decided to colour it in and go over the handwritten text with a pencil… 

If you feel like checking out my published comic work of the early 90s, you can see some of it in my old blogposts HERE and HERE.

MY COMICS WORK: THE FROLICS OF THE ONE-HORNED DEVIL, PART THREE (FINAL)

Here’s part three with the grand finale of the story :) Go HERE for part one and HERE for part two.

MY COMICS WORK: THE FROLICS OF THE ONE-HORNED DEVIL, PART TWO

Time for part two the story that I drew in 1990 or thereabouts for the national humour magazine. You can read the first part HERE. The magazine lost my original artwork of the first page below, so the image is scanned from the printed version, hence poor quality.

The last four pages will be up soon!

P.S. Apologies for possible delays in publishing and/or replying to your comments – I will be travelling overseas starting from the coming Sunday until the middle of the month and may have limited internet access at times. I have scheduled the next part to go live automatically :)