in the age of dinosaurs I used to color this way

I got a package in the mail the other day that maybe you’ll find interesting. It was from Mad Magazine(remember them?).  They are “moving their offices” (cough cough see blog here cough) and they are returning artwork they still had to their respective illustrators.   Even when I started most people just sent files, but a few of us did things old school and sent them whatever medium we were working in.  Before that, illustrators would send them the actual art.  and some of it, for whatever reason ended up in a series of big drawers to collect dust.  I visited Mad once and got to look through the drawers and ..wow…there is some historical stuff in those drawers, including this piece by Jack Davis that was I think like 18×24 inches ( my memory could be fuzzy, but it was big)

…so if you see some seller on ebay suddenly moving a lot of old Mad art, you’ll know someone over there got wise and lifted a bunch of stuff out of the drawers before the..move (cough cough).

What they sent back to me were color cells.  Allow me to explain. At the time I had zero idea of how to use photoshop.  Not that it was that long ago…I just hadn’t bothered to learn yet. Everything I did was by hand and black and white, so until I started doing stuff for Mad I had no real need to learn much about color. The original 19 or so Arsenic Lullaby covers and the first handful of things I did for Mad were colored like this- I copied the black and white illustration onto a transparent mylar sheet and colored the back (kind of like an animation cell…when they had animation cells)

I’d send a couple different color versions, and let them pick. at some point I did a page for them with some children at a birthday party and they said the kids should be “multi cultural”, meaning some black some white some Hispanic and so on. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out I was going to have to redo that a whole bunch of times, because they would decide one kid was too dark or not dark enough or whatever…and that it was time to learn photoshop.

The paint I used was called “one shot” and was for pin striping cars or painting logos on things, I used it because I was familiar with it from…pin striping cars and painting logos on things, a side job I had in between my side job of working security at concerts and driving a limo…I’ve had a lot of jobs…and somehow they all involved dealing with drunk 20 year old women.  I like to tell myself that was a coincidence.

The paint was noxious (they still kinda smell and these are 8 years old) and ruined brushes after just a few uses. So graduating to photoshop was nice. Including mixing the paint to get the right colors it would take me around an hour to hand paint something…but with now photoshop it takes..two hours…and one computer error will evaporate a fays work with not a trace of it anywhere.

Anyways…here’s some of the rest. they are 5×11 comics on 8×11 cardstock and they have a little official EC publications stamp on them (either on the front or back).

I suppose I’ll sell em, the last thing I need is more artwork lying around here. They are better off somewhere that they are appreciated.  With the EC stamp they are a nice piece of Mad history, Arsenic Lullaby history…and maybe comic making history. I have two of each of what I’m showing here…I don’t know which one was used, I can’t really tell the difference between any of the versions anymore…even though at the time I thought they were substantially different.

If you’re interested contact me at douglaspasz –at—arseniclullabies.com

I’ll put them up on the actual store later

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