I came across this particular drawing (it’s actually a COPY of the drawing– I think I gave the original to my bud Todd Dezago)– and it was a funny (NOW) reminder of a very strange situation that I was a part of years back. I’ve stated a few times in the past here that during MARVEL’s time in the midst of bankruptcy… somewhere around 1997 or so (I think), things were very unsettled for me. I was at that time kind of like a sailboat in a sea squall…. tossed from side to side as things happened around me that were completely out of my control. One such situation was one involving the HULK ongoing comic book. THEN MARVEL Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras made an odd arbitrary decision to remove Peter David as writer from THE HULK. Why he decided on this, I still don’t know. Only he and Peter really know– but at that time of real turmoil at MARVEL, Harras was making (or in some cases NOT making) a lot of really odd and bad calls, and this one was a real peach.

They had just cancelled SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN, and Todd and I were wondering about our next assignment. Harras decided it would be THE HULK and foisted us on the book’s editor, Bobbie Chase. Todd and I were really sort of terrified about the whole thing– because we knew that Peter David was a very popular writer and that his HULK run was a fan favorite. Hell, -I- had been buying his work on HULK from his first issue and loved it, so I was ONE of those fans. We both felt that WHOEVER followed Peter on the book would be roundly vilified by Peter’s fans. And personally, I felt my own work was rather inaproppriate for the title. All my discussions with Todd at the time were in this realm– and not much about what we actually wanted to do creatively on THE HULK. We both felt like pawns in a situation we really didn’t like. Something happened along the way in Todd’s discussions with Bobbie Chase, and he was eventually removed as the “new writer”. I quit as well, citing a lack of real interest (but it was more in support of Todd and our reticence to get thrown into this hornet’s nest). I DID do this drawing as a way of trying to pump up Todd’s enthusiasm (and my OWN). I guess in the end, it really didn’t work.

But it WAS an interesting time.

Mike