When I was growing up I wanted to draw Marvel Comics more than anything else in the world… 

In my teens, in the late 70s, I drew and self-published my own comic fanzine, The Mighty Apocalypse, spending far more time on it than my studies. 

In the 80s, when I was in my 20s I finally got to work in comics professionally, with Shatter, an original strip in a magazine called Thunder Action that reprinted out of copyright T.H.U.N.D.E.R Agents strips. I say ‘professional’ but that’s in the loosest sense of the word - but I did get paid for it. But it wasn’t for Marvel Comics…

By this point the lure of becoming a full-time comic book artist had faded significantly but in the back of my mind there was still a little voice saying ‘Marvel Comics, Marvel Comics…’

So when, in 1993, the chance finally came to have some work published by Marvel, I jumped at it. By this time it wasn’t a matter of ‘what you know’ but ‘who you know’, as several of my contemporaries were now working in the industry in one way or another. In this case my old friend Richard Ashford, from Acme Press & Speakeasy fame was in New York working as an editor for Marvel. He commissioned mutual friend Cefn Ridout and myself to put together a one-off issue called Avengers Strikefile. 

The bulk of the issue was a ‘proper’ comic, illustrated by Jeff Moore, but there was a central section, Galactic Mourning, written by Cefn and featuring ‘Computer graphics, enhancements and visualisations’ by myself, which served as recap of of the massively complex Skrull/Kree cosmic war - lots of aliens punching the crap out of each other, basically.

I didn’t so much draw it, as do a complex cut and paste job using images from many older comics, and wrapping them up with a healthy dose of 3D rendered spaceships, robots and planets and psychedelic computer effects that were popular back in the day (who else remembers Kai’s Power Tools?). These days the 3D graphics look especially crude but remember, this was before Toy Story came out so the benchmark was pretty low…

Back in those days, comics weren’t coloured on computers plus there was no way of getting the digital files to Marvel (they wouldn’t have know what to do with them anyway) so the artwork was output as CMYK colour separated films and shipped to them like that - so in other words, they never had any original artwork, which must have been pretty strange for them.

So off the films went to New York, and I waited with bated breath to see what the final printed thing would look like - it was such an unusual process, that there was definitely a chance that things might go spectacularly wrong! My promised complimentary copies never arrived but I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy and was quite pleasantly surprised. 

Job done! Crossed off the bucket list!

Anyway, today, 25 years later, it was released digitally. They’ve got an enormous back catalogue of stuff that they’re slowly working through and there’s lots of more deserving stuff still waiting, so I wasn’t expecting to see it pop up on Comixology.

Considering Marvel have never had the original art as such, I’m not sure exactly how they’ve done the digital transfer - it looks better than a scan but not as good as the original digital files. I guess they’ve scanned in the black and white films again and assigned a colour to each one then assembled them digitally - especially since one of the pages looks like they’ve mixed up the films :) And they missed a page out! Luckily it wasn’t a story page…

So, all in all, a very nice little surprise to see my one and only Marvel Comic officially on my iPad at last.