Hey Guys.
John Stokes got back to me with the answers to your questions. Here you go:
I would love to know more about his time on the 'Star Trek' strip in 'TV21', which he handled for over 2 years from 1971-1973. I noticed he dropped in the odd alien from the TV series, and wondered if he watched 'Star Trek' for reference, or was he given proper reference material to work from, in those halcyon days before the internet or, indeed, VHS!
As I remember, it was pretty difficult. I was given a paperback about the making of the series, which contained about a dozen small stills from the series. So, using these and whatever photos I could find in Radio Times and the occasional magazine I had to try to get reasonable likenesses and correct-lookind hardware. And Yes, well spotted, I spent lots of time in front of the TV with a pad on my knees, trying to catch a likeness. No VHS with freeze-frame, no Internet! Young artists
today don't know they're born!
Did he know who was writing the strip, also?
I have absolutely no idea who the scripts were by. I suppose they must have had a writer's name on them, but it probably didn't mean anything to me, so I promptly forgot it.
And did he have any views on how his 'Star Trek' strips were coloured? In the States, I think artists mark up colour even though they work in just black and white. Was it the same for his work for IPC, or did the colourists just do what they wanted?
We were never asked about the colouring . It just happened. All the colours were pretty harsh and primary, and as often happens, even now, you draw a face with prominent shadowing on one side of the face, and for some reason the colourist takes it into his/her head to put the colour shadows on the other side. Very perplexing. I would rather the series was printed in black and white, But it was always out of our hands, if it was a centre-fold strip, it was coloured. The only exception to this was in the mid to late sixties, when Fleetway experimented with a fluid, which, when painted onto line artwork, would print as a tone, a bit like zip-a-tone (remember that?) not in colour, but it gave the artist a greater control of the final pages. It must have presented printing problems, or was too costly, because it dissapeared before long.
Muffy
Thank you very much for the kind words about 'Marney the Fox', Muffy. I really enjoyed researching all the 'nature' details for all the wildlife and the backgrounds, and in a way, it felt more like the kind of drawing from life that I had been taught at Art School than the ordinary stuff of comic art, which is as much about style and artifice as it is about the real roots of drawing. That was refreshing, and I hope it fed back into the later stuff I did,
Contributing to the script and the storyline was never a possibility, given the way we worked in those days. The weekly publication date was a stern taskmaster, especially as I had other stories that I was working on during the period that I worked on 'Marney' It is quite amazing that, despite the fact that we worked as a writer/artist team for nine years, Scott and I never once met, or even corresponded, except through the scripts. As I explain to Jim in the forthcoming interview, I often had to start, finish and post a two page episode on the same day. I probably didn't do this often with 'Marney' because of the massive volume of reference needed, and all that background detail in the panels, but I shouldn't think I could have ever afforded the time to take more than two days on an episode without getting seriously behind with something else.
As far as I know, it was always the plan to take Marney's story from birth to adulthood. I expect the decesion to finish where we did was taken by Scott and Len Wenn, the editor. I think 'The War Children' was very close to Scott's heart, too. I half remember Len telling me he had some connections with the Channel Islands, where the story was set, so there could have been an element of autobiography in there. I wonder if anybody knows anything about that?
Thanks again for your interest, Muffy.
Warmest regards,
John.
philcom 55
I feel a bit uncomfortable with the role of 'oldest surviving example', especially as I haven't made my mind up about what I'm going to do when I grow up.
You're right, it was a labour of love, and I hope it comes through that whatever the pressure of deadlines, I was determined to put everything into those pages that they seemed to need, regardless of the expence in terms of time spent on them. Even now, I think it ranks as one of my top three jobs in terms of enjoyment and satisfaction. I guess I must have flirted with the idea of branching off into wildlife painting, but the everyday battle of doing six or more pages a week didn't allow for it to be more than a pipe dream.
As to your question about earning potential. Spot on! I read once, I think in an interview with Cam Kennedy, but I'm not sure, the sterling piece of advice to young artists to cultivate a simple style that could be quickly executed, and he quoted Schultz, of 'Peanuts' fame as an excellent example. Even now my wife looks over my shoulder at some madly complicated peice of work and asks "How much are you getting a page for this?" But on the plus side, I don't expect I would have teamed up with Phil Jiminez if I hadn't been able to follow the fantastically complex pages he produced for 'Tempest' or 'The Invisibles', would I?
The fantastic output of Spanish and South American artists working for IPC at that time is because a lot of them employed studios of artists who would ink, fill in backgrounds, etc, for them. I remember an editor telling me that when he complained to one Sothy American artist that the quality wasn't what it once was, the artist shamefacedly admitted that he hadn't touched the pages for more than a month, and would start having more input in future!
I'm not saying that Solano Lopez was one of those. I do remember doing issue one of the 'Toymaker' story. It was always going to be a one-off. For some reason Solano was'nt able to do it in time, I think he was moving or something like that. Was that when he moved back to Argentina? Probably not, I think that was 1975 or 76. As to the resizing, that happened a lot. In this case it may have been a result of moving to a comic with a different page size? I really don't know. It certainly wasn't a reprint.
Many thanks for the questions and the kind words,
All the best,
John.
Lew Stringer.
In all the years that I worked for Fleetway/IPC I never recall a case of a story or issue not being published. Did that happen often, Lew? Do you know of titles of stories or Comics? I certainly haven't got any pages in my collection that were drawn and not used. Come to that, I haven't got a single page of original art from all those hundreds of pages I produced for IPC. It just wasn't the habit of publishers to return artwork in those days. It's a bit galling to see them up for auction on E-Bay from time to time. Things changed when I began to work for Dez Skinn and Marvel UK. I have quite a bunch of 'Black Knight' pages and most of 'The legend of Prester John'
philcom, Digifriend and felneymike
Annuals are a great scource of nostalgia, aren't they? I'm often leafing through one in a charity shop or Boot Sale, and think"My God, did I do that?"
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