As I’ve written in recent posts about Todd’s and my time on SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN, our flow was frequently interrupted by stunts and crossovers. These mandatory events (often dictated by the marketing folks, I think) always seemed like a real pain in the creative keester– but Todd always found a way to make it lots of fun for me to draw. When I initially heard about the company-wide FLASHBACK event that Marvel was initiating, I was very put off. I didn’t want to do it. But after talking with Todd and hearing the ideas he had for it I got excited. The idea behind FLASHBACK was to tell stories that took place before the heroes that star in Marvel comics became the costumed do-gooders they become. Todd’s idea was to create a story that took place back in Peter Parker’s childhood. He falls asleep reading his favorite monster comics (Marvel monsters, natch)– and NIGHTMARE invades his dreaming mind. In Peter’s dream, he and Uncle Ben go on a fishing trip, and while there, they are attacked by many of the very monsters from Peter’s comics. Realizing this, he is able to defeat most of the behemoths until at the very end….. well– if you haven’t read the book, I don’t want to spoil the WHOLE thing for you. I really enjoyed this book at the end of the day– it was kind of an artist’s dream. It had almost everything one could want to draw in it… bizarre creatures, kids, lots of action and some really great and touching quiet scenes. One of those quiet scenes in particular still hits me right in the heart. As Peter and Uncle Ben leave home for their trip, Ben muses that it’s too bad that none of Peter’s friends could accompany them on the trip. Peter just give him a weak ‘Yeah…”. But Ben knows that Peter doesn’t have many– if any– real friends. He’s a painfully introverted kid sorely in need of an ego boost, and this was Ben’s attempt to draw him into a discussion that would hopefully provide a breakthrough to allow Peter to grow in confidence. Not wanting to push it and perhaps ruin the trip, though, Ben lets it drop. It was a very touching and poignant scene– but that’s Todd for you. I didn’t do the description of the scene justice… but if you’ve read it in the comic, you know.

I’ll leave you to the whims of the weekend with a couple of the head sketches I did for folks at the show in Baltimore. I found them on COMICARTFANS. Hopefully the owners won’t mind that I ‘nabbed’ them from the site.

OK– have a great weekend and I’ll see you here on Monday.

This is Entry 277.

Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.