MORRISON MONDAYS! qdsasa By BILL MORRISON Back in the Bongo Age of Comics, I had the good fortune to work with Batton Lash as his editor on our Eisner Award-winning Radioactive Man series. From the very first issue, Radioactive Man’s mission was to parody the history of comics, and in 2000 I had asked Bat to write the rebooted adventures of the Atomic Avenger in a new series because he really knew his onions when it came to comics history. One of the issues Bat pitched, Radioactive Man #222, was set firmly in 1973 and parodied the “Crisis on Campus!” storylines that were popular in comics at the time. I was an avid Marvel reader in those days, and a charter member of the Jim Steranko-designed and edited Marvel fan club, F.O.O.M. (which stands for Friends of Ol’ Marvel). When Batton turned in his script for the issue, he included a Stan Lee-style column page that included a come-on to join COZ — Citizens Of Zenith — a club for Radioactive Man fans. Naturally, the patter of the COZ ad matched the circa ’73 Marvel style, and the items offered in the fan club kit were a nod to the goodies I’d received when I joined F.O.O.M. It was a spot-on parody of early 70s Marvel hype. Bat asked me if it was possible to actually make the COZ kit described in the ad available to readers, almost 30 years past when the issue was supposedly published, making it a real ad disguised as a fake one. Recognizing brilliant ideas when I hear them, I thought that was a brilliant idea! I’ve always felt wistful when I see an ad for something cool in an old back issue of a comic or monster mag, knowing that the offer was no longer valid, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that feeling. I got approval for a limited number of items that we could produce cheaply, in-house, so the F.O.O.M. poster became a low budget 8” x 10” photo print, and the stickers were replaced by non-sticky ink-jet printed “flyers” of the same size. We did have a membership card that a Bongo employee had to print out and cut on a paper cutter, and a printed envelope, plus a letter from Radioactive Man’s imaginary creator, Morty Mann himself, printed...
MORRISON MONDAYS! By BILL MORRISON Even though this is being read a few days after Halloween, it’s being written on that day exactly. And since I’m still very much in the Halloween mood as I write, I’ve decided to show a limited-edition print that I drew and painted several years ago for The Simpsons animation art program. Old movie posters are a favorite parody subject of mine, so when this job came along, I really dove into it. The subject is “Time and Punishment,” one of three segments from The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror V from 1994. If you’ve seen it, you may have recognized that the story itself is a parody of Ray Bradbury’s classic tale, “A Sound of Thunder.” And the title is a parody of the Dostoevsky novel, “Crime and Punishment,” making this print a parody triple-play! In the segment, Homer is fixing a toaster and gets sucked into a vortex that sends him back in time to a prehistoric era, where he accidentally kills a mosquito. This alters time in a very negative way (I won’t spoil it for you, the way somebody spoiled Peacemaker Season 2 for me!), and Homer ping-pongs back and forth through time in an effort to get his present-day world back to normal. The design of the print is based on several science-fiction movie posters from the 1950s, and like those fantastic posters it features vignette line-art that illustrates key moments in the segment with lots of cheesy, hyperbolic text, and a painted main image that shows Homer being pulled through time. This limited edition giclee print was issued decades ago, but amazingly, it’s still available at ACME Archives Direct, in both paper and canvas editions, at their website. And like I said, I’m in a Halloween mood, so I’m going to pop some corn and see if I can find on TV one of those scary sci-fi movies that inspired the print! — Want more MORRISON MONDAYS? Come back next week! Want a commission? See below! — MORE — When ALICE COOPER, GENE SIMMONS, ROB ZOMBIE — and PAT BOONE — Entered BART SIMPSON’S TREEHOUSE OF HORROR. Click here. — THE JUNGLE BOOK: The Joy of Being Part of a Beloved DISNEY Classic. Click here. — Eisner winner BILL MORRISON has been working in comics and publishing since 1993 when he co-founded...
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