Phigments Promo Drawing (And Tales From The 80's B&W Glut) (Patreon)

While messaging with a backer here the subject of the first series I worked on back in the day came up, and I remembered that someone had sent me a promo piece done done for it.

This was probably drawn in 1986. I don't remember penciling this piece, and I had to look up who the inker on it is -- based on the signature and a brief search I'm guessing someone named Bill Anderson, who is credited for work with the publisher, Pied Piper Press (Phigments was first published by Amazing Comics, and then the affiliated Pied Piper Press published the second and final issue. All under the shitty umbrella of Scott Rosenberg who became filthy rich, proving once again that there is no God. Fun fact: Joe's origin story in The Eltingville Club is based on the purported beginnings of Rosenberg's comic dealing/publishing/fucking people over/succeeding wildly with Malibu/Men in Black days).

The characters in the promo piece are Bugbear, Ecto and...jeez...I have to look up the guy with all the hair. And the female lead. It's been a long time. Hold on while I do a search. It's easier than unearthing the file copies.

..............

Okay, found an eBay listing that actually took the time to write up some details about the comic. The guy in the cape and hair is Badfinger. The woman is Dora Nash. I wouldn't have remembered that if you put three guns to my head and one on my cat.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Phigments was the first comic series I worked on, when almost anyone who could hold a pencil or bang on a typewriter got into the comics industry via the black & white speculation boom. After The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles blew up and the first issue became a speculation sensation, everyone and their mother started up a small press outfit and started churning out b&w comics, most of them utter garbage. There was some decent and interesting stuff happening, of course, but mostly it was sub-amateur hour, with some people brazenly shoveling up half-assed shit strictly to fuel the speculator engines. It didn't really matter what was inside the comics, because they were being ordered by retailers in crazy numbers for collectors hoping to find more back issue gold in them thar hills. Or landfills, as it were.

In time the market was flooded with new publishers and self-publishers vomiting up such titles as Geriatric Gangrene Jujitsu Gerbils, Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, Pre-Teen Dirty-Gene Kung-Fu Kangaroos, Aristocratic Xtraterrestrial Time-Traveling Thieves, Cold Blooded Chameleon Commandos, Mildly Microwaved Pre-Pubescent Kung-Fu Gophers, Naive Inter-Dimensional Commando Koalas, G.I. Jack Rabbits, Hamster Vice, Miami Vice, et al. And that's just some of the TMNT bandwagon crap. Tons of terrible comics were ordered and soon most of them sat rotting in comic shops dollar bins and backrooms. They're still lurking about in decrepit cardboard boxes somewhere on this earth.

One of them was Phigments. I got the gig through a friend of the comic shop I worked at (Jim Hanley's Universe). His name was Alan Rowlands and he had written some fill-in issues for Marvel and DC and was developing Phigments to pitch to the newly-formed b&w indy publishers. He asked me to design the characters and pencil the series. He took me on a few interviews, I only remember us pitching to the folks at Deluxe Comics (who also looked at my early sketches and pages for Pirate Corp$!). Eventually Alan landed Phigments with Amazing Comics -- I don't remember how that came about -- and I had my first actual comics gig.

I wasn't good, but I tried my best. The first issue supposedly sold around 24 thousand copies or so, which should have earned us royalties but we never saw a dime towards that. Which is one reason I set dagger-eyes on publisher Dave Campiti ever since (there are other reasons, and I'm far from the only one who has him on a comics shitlist). So, I had my first taste of working in comics, and my first experience with getting ripped off in comics. I took this experience to heart and tried to cover myself as much as possible moving on. But in 1986, 21 years old, ignorant and not wanting to make waves, I didn't follow up on it. Which was dumb. I can't think offhand of another time that I was willfully ripped off by a publisher -- I had a problem getting paid by Tony Caputo of Now Comics -- another piece of work that freelancers still talk shit about -- but unlike with Amazing, I made sure that I got what was owed me. It was the only time I ever threatened anyone in comics. I told Caputo over the phone that I would take a train with several skinhead friends to Chicago and and we'd kick his windows out as a start. It was an empty threat (I had maybe one skinhead associate at the time and they weren't violent, more importantly, how could I afford train tickets to Chicago if I was broke and desperately needed my thousand dollar check for Ghostbusters #4 pencils?), but it worked. Caputo told me he's send my check but I was never to call him again. Oh, and I'd never work for NOW again. As if I wanted to. There are some good stories about how people got their money out of him back in the day. Oy.

End of digression.

Phigments ran for two cruddy issues, at which point Alan ghosted everyone. He wasn't in touch with the publisher, our editors actually blasted us in the letters page of the second issue because no one knew what the hell was going on in the book and with the book. I sure as hell didn't. It was unreal. No royalties and I get insulted in print by the editors for something beyond my control. I actually started laying out a third issue that I was going to ghost-write, but I realized that was a fool's errand and I quit. Not that I had much of a choice, really. Everyone had thirty other projects sititng on their desk during the b&w glut, no one needed a confusing comic with a missing writer and an amateur artist.

So, RIP Phigments.

Eventually -- and inevitably -- the speculating bubble burst and the collapse impacted the entire industry. It took down publishers, retailers and at least one distributor. Cash flow spiraled, payments were late or stopped for distributors, publishers and creators. It was a disaster of the industry's own making. The creators working on most of the glut comics were amateurs, at best. Most of them never worked in comics again, some who self-published their work lost a bundle and disappeared from the game. Some people held on by their fingers and stayed in comics and improved their craft, folks like Darick Robertson, Bart Sears, Ron Lim and Scott Hanna to name a few off the top of my head. And some of the talented folks on the art/indy side of things just kept moving right along, like Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez.

I managed to stick it out. Despite someone involved with Phigments telling people at a NYC con that I had no future in comics (overheard by a friend who related the story to me). That person is no longer in comics, but I'm still here, alive and kibbitzing. And Phigments had a lot to do with me having a career. The people I met at the Deluxe Comics meeting -- Brian David-Marshall and Tony Eng -- had started a new company called Eternity and contacted me about the Pirate Corp$! characters. According to Brian I was super obnoxious and told them they had to come out to Staten Island if they wanted me to sign the contract to publish the series. I don't remember this at all, of course. But they came out to Jim Hanley's Universe, met the gang and we signed the deal. And this led to a cross-pollination of friends and comrades.

Pirate Corp$! only lasted four issues at Eternity. But it was an important step in my career. Brian and Tony got me to go to SDCC in 1987 for the debut of PC$! #1, and that show turned out to be a huge deal for me. I met a lot of people there and the following year who would later help me break into comics full-time. Diana Schutz hired me in 1991 for a Predator series in trouble because the artist ghosted them. I met Fabian Nicieza the following year at SDCC, after becoming an editor at Marvel he hired me in 1991 for Bill and Ted. In 1987 at SDCC Pirate Corp$! got picked up by SLG, and in 1991 they published Milk & Cheese #1. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't started going to SDCC, back when the industry was smaller and things were looser and you could meet and talk with almost everyone.

I'm still friends with Brian and Tony. I've worked with Brian on a few comics projects since the Eternity days (designing his Craptacular B-Sides characters for a Marvel run, for one). Brian became a manager at JHU a while after Eternity folded into the Malibu-verse, then opened Neutral Ground in NYC with ex-JHU folks and later on became a name in TCG/Magic The Gathering circles. He's currently the mastermind of the Cataclysm Arcade TCG which recently had a phenomenal Kickstarter campaign, raising over two million dollars (!). Several comics artists are involved with the card art, such as Steve Ellis, ChrisCross and Benjamin Dewey, my collaborator on Beasts of Burden. I'm going to see Tony in Atlanta this weekend while I'm at the Comicopia show and catch up on things since he left NYC.

Comics is a ridiculous profession but you'll make friends for life.