Midnight Commando #2

Midnight Commando #2I called my minicomics publishing company Obscure Komix. I published three series:
Cheap Thrills: an anthology of short horror stories
The Highly Unlikely Adventures of Moe and Detritus: featuring the exploits of a couple of punks named (surprise!) Moe and Detritus
The Davey Thunder / Jack Lightning Show: a surreal series written by Glenn Ingersoll featuring a pair of DJs that we’d invented when we were in junior high

When I sat down to create these “covers” for All Cover Comics I wanted them to seem like covers of actual comics. Or at least as close to actual comics as I was going to get when drawing the art by hand. Real comics had consistent logos for each series and real comic book companies to put their logos on the the series they published. So I decided to use my Obscure Komix company as the publisher and I created a logo to be used for all the issues.

The logos had to be created by hand. This was 1990. There was no Illustrator and no Photoshop. I drew the OK logo by hand and then reduced it using the photocopiers at Kinkos. I did the same thing with the Midnight Commando logo. In 1990 photocopiers weren’t good at laying down areas of solid black, usually you ended up with an inconsistent dark gray. The image above is scanned from the original artwork and it’s easy to tell the difference between the photocopied logo and the black ink of the drawing. Even adjusting for contrast in Photoshop doesn’t make them match.