MADONNA COMICS

A lot of you may know it or not, but I have been a lifelong fan of Madonna since she jumped on the music scene in 1979. Love her, her music and all her political statements about living your life the way you want it. I never agreed with all of what she did, but the music has been consistently great over the years and I have enjoyed a few of her live concerts as well. I will remind you, this was a time she took the city then the world by a storm, each and every video she released became a party in a club in New York and I was there to celebrate them all. My life in the 80’s was all new wave music, night clubs, fast women, used cars, and a lot of things I try to forget. They were some of the best years of my life, mainly because I really didn’t have a care in the world.

So, in 1991, a company called Personality Comics run by Adam Post, a small publisher out of Long Island, approached me asking if I would illustrate two issues of a comic written by Stephen Spire III- someone I did not know at the time- about the life of Madonna. Yeah, I have no clue how this happened, but I guess it was fate. They offered a decent page rate and told me most of the comics would consist of splash pages with some story around it. The company published a lot of comics around different famous people in movies, sports, and music – all unauthorized, and most were just okay at best, but they had my interest. Trust me, if they came to me about illustrating just about anyone else, it would have been a hard pass for me.

I was just starting to get work at Marvel, but only ink work, so I took this on, figuring why not draw the material girl for 40 pages plus. A good exercise for a very insecure penciler. I got the scripts and it was about some stalker after Madonna, not really important to anything, and in-between all of that, it was a breakdown of Madonna’s career, told in comic form. It was a really an odd job for sure, but I got to go down to the Strand Bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan and buy up a ton of Madonna books for reference. Yeah, I already had the magazines, singles and albums and a few calendars on my wall, but I was going to need a lot more than that. I really never needed an excuse to go to the strand, but this one visit, I had a real purpose to dig through that wonderful place of millions of books.

With all my reference gathered up I went to work and knocked out the two books in a few months, Penciling and inking myself which was pretty new to me, and even having time to watercolor the cover to the second issue using reference of a photo taken of her years before. It was a fun gig. I used my girlfriend at the time as a victim and my brother for some of the shots as well as posing myself here and there. As well, I had some inking help by my buddy Michael Bair on the book. We were inking some Sleepwalker at the time and he wanted to mess with some of my pencils, which I welcomed.

Looking back, it’s hard for me to look at the actual work, but at the time I felt I did a decent job even with all the flaws. So, the book came out, one regular edition and a signed edition and it did very well numbers wise, compared to their other books. So, it’s a success. Did they call me to do more? Nope, and to tell the truth, my inking work was picking up at Marvel so I had much better gigs waiting for me on deck. It’s funny, because another thing I collect is actual art of Madonna, and I have a lot of cool famous pieces I picked up over the years by top illustrators. Looking back this made sense at the time. The good news folks if you ever want to pick up these books, I warn you, there isn’t much there to read, the drawings could have been better and so on, but you can still find them on E-Bay for cover price, so that’s a good thing.

Anyway, Madonna comics. I did a few.