The following half dozen random pages are from a comic book I created in 1978, the first of many releases from DJ Comics, a joint production with another comic-reading nerd, a friend named Derek (see The Secret Society of Super Liars for the full story).
The ungainly-titled The Deadly Duo Presents Sweatbee & Conductor #1 featured eighteen pages of badly photocopied B&W art, panels I cribbed from existing comics, redressing the likes of Spiderman, The Wasp, and Ms. Marvel as my own characters. The banal dialog was later squeezed into the balloons, in the classic Marvel production style.
The Deadly Duo #1 was sold at my middle school for 20¢ a copy. Derek’s contribution was hand-coloring each cover of the dozen or so print run. I craftily turned a copy in to my art class for my summer project, getting an A, and a pat on the back, from my eminently sexy art teacher, Miss Brown, who was renowned in my over-heated peer group for regularly failing to wear a bra. Which, of course, to us was no failure at all.
Created during my short-lived obsession with the super hero genre, I thought nothing of peopling the story with Marvel and DC characters, a solid legal team apparently at my disposal.
Looking back at the individual pages and panels I am surprised at how primitive they are, especially where my source material failed me. In places the art appears to have been taken straight from the worst coloring book one can imagine, in others it almost (through not fault of its own) borders on the more sublime sensibilities of a post-modern artists like Gary Panter. For a reading of the complete comic, click on this slideshow.
