Mark Comic Book
Milba Vanpatten
I was a big fan of Peanuts, MAD Magazine and Wacky Packages. If you don't know what Wacky Packages are, look them up. They are product-parody-collector-sticker-cards produced by Topps. They came before Garbage Pail Kids. Here is one I drew for fun when I was about 12 or 13.
When The Far Side showed up, that changed everything. That was the type of humor I felt was right for me. I drew a bunch of gags, to make sure I could keep it up, then showed the strongest ones to a local editor. She offered to pay me to publish them once a week. I was lucky to have that early success. It was the confidence boost I needed to stick with it.
That Nails cartoon soon became a T-shirt design that appeared in catalogs. It made good money and I got BIG EYES. I figured if I could get a few more T-shirts into these catalogs, I could clean up. Rake it in. Live the life of Riley. But, of course, no other T-shirt design performed like that Nails design. That was a lesson and I don't take any success for granted.
Anyway, I soon started self-syndicating Off the Mark to other weekly papers. My client list slowly grew and I went daily in 1991 and added a Sunday in 1995. In 2002, Off the Mark was picked up by United Media, and then went Universal Uclick in 2011.
I decided to continue to make cartoons about inanimate objects and always make sure I create at least one a month. Other subjects I really enjoy tackling are cats and dogs. In real life, they enjoy tackling me. We have four cats and a dog, so there's no shortage of ideas. Or fur.
I have always enjoyed parodying other cartoon characters. As a kid, I remember drawing Charlie Brown looking back as he ran with his kite, all excited to finally get it in the air, not realizing he was running off a cliff. I also remember having Fred Flintstone devour Barney Rubble for some reason. I've carried that parody mentality to Off the Mark.
It can be challenging working with constant deadlines, but I don't think I'd get anything done without them. In fact, I'm writing this at the very last minute. Maybe I'll end up staying up until 3 a.m. to get the rest of my work done.
Single-panel cartoons can be versatile in both subject matter and application. For subject matter, I can pretty much draw whatever ideas I come up with (within the bounds of taste). For application, they work well on things besides newspapers "... greeting cards, day-to-day calendars, books, newsletters, presentations, etc., so my income is diversified.
My freelance work varies. I did a cartoon for Billboard magazine for a few years, and that led to me working with the Dixie Chicks. I periodically work on a project for the military called That Guy, which aims to discourage binge drinking. I get to draw urine and vomit and other things I secretly like to draw but have a hard time working in to my cartoon since it appears in family newspapers.
My wife, Lynn, and I run the offthemark.com cartoon site. The cartoons are broken up by category and there's an awesome search engine. Come on by and look at all 8,000 cartoons and feel free to critique each and every one for me.
Being a cartoonist still feels like a dream I'm supposed to wake up from. The National Cartoonists Society awarded Off the Mark "Best in Newspaper Panels" in 2008 and 2011, and I was also honored with "Best Greeting Cards" in 2013. When I was a kid, if you had told me "...
I have an expensive CGC 9.0 graded copy of Weird Fantasy Annual #1. It is pretty much flawless except for a pencil mark at the top of the "Fantasy" on the front cover and a tiny tear on the edge of the back cover. I'm trying to decide whether to have CCS or someone else try to remove the pencil, or just leave it alone. It it got bumped to a 9.2 it would double in value.
The small indents they mention on the front cover (pic attached) look like they might press out. I'm not sure what their last note means: "wear all corners back cover breaks cover." The corners look quite sharp to me and they are white (so no color to break anyway)?
The pencil marks in the logo, while a bit distracting, don't trouble me as much as the wear and tear to the back cover. I believe that would be why the final grader's note refers to the corners of the back cover showing wear...the top and bottom of the spine actually appear to have a small crunch. It is interesting they added the "breaks color" comment, since the corners of the back cover are white---that comment is usually reserved for white color breaks on a dark background.
This could be a tough book to upgrade, IMO. While those indents on the front cover may be reduced or eliminated with a press, those small color breaks will still be visible. And while the Cream to Off-White page designation doesn't detract from the overall grade, many times this indicates there may be some tanning or age-toning to the interior cover as well.
The pencil mark is not what is keeping this book 9.0, it can't be. So removing it will have 0 effect. Instead, what's keeping it down are some spine ticks, two issues on the back edge (I see a smaller nick below the bigger tear) and there is something going on with that top and bottom right corners at the spine. Do you have the grader notes on this? That would help you see what is bringing down the grade. if you don't have them, you can purchase them from CGC for 5$.
In addition to his work as a writer, Millar serves as an executive producer on all film and television adaptations of his comics. Between 2012 and 2016, he was employed by 20th Century Fox as a creative consultant for adaptations of Marvel properties.
Millar has four older brothers,[7][8] and one older sister, who are 22, 20, 18, 16 and 14 years older than him, respectively.[8] He was first introduced to comic books at age 4 by his brother Bobby, who at the time was attending university and, as of 2010, worked at a special needs school.[9] The first comics that Millar read were the seminal The Amazing Spider-Man #121, which featured the death of Gwen Stacy, and a Superman book purchased by Bobby that day.[8] Millar's interest in the medium was further cemented with the black-and-white reprints of other comics that his brothers purchased for him,[7] which he enjoyed so much that he drew a spider web across his face with an indelible marker that his parents were unable to scrub off in time for his First Communion photo a week later.[8]
In the mid-late 1970s, Millar frequently appeared as a guest on the long-running Scottish kids TV programme Glen Michael's Cartoon Cavalcade, which he was a regular fan of at the time. On one occasion, he was invited onto the show to talk about the history of comics and, in a 2010 interview with the Scottish newspaper Daily Record, Millar has stated that Glen Michael's TV programme was where he first discovered superheroes.[10]
Millar's mother died of a heart attack at age 64, when Millar was 14, and his father died four years later, aged 65.[8] Although Millar enjoyed drawing comics, he was not permitted to go to art school because his family frowned upon such endeavours as a waste of time for the academic Millar, who studied subjects like chemistry, physics and advanced maths. He initially planned to be a doctor, and subsequently decided that becoming an economist would be a viable alternate plan, but later decided that he "couldn't quite hack it" in that occupation.[7] He attended Glasgow University to study politics and economics, but dropped out after his father's death left him without the money to pay his living expenses.[8]
Millar was first inspired to become a comic book creator after meeting Alan Moore at a con in the mid-1980s.[11][12] Years later, when an 18-year-old Millar interviewed Scottish comic book writer Grant Morrison for a fanzine, he told Morrison that he wanted to create comics as both a writer and an artist. Morrison, who then-recently returned to comics after spending most of the decade touring with their band The Mixers and had limited experience with both writing and drawing stories earlier in their career, suggested that Millar focus on one of those career paths, as it was very hard to be successful at both, which Millar cites as the best advice he has ever received.[13][7] Soon after, Millar sold his first script, Saviour, to an independent Leicester-based publisher Trident. Illustrated by Daniel Vallely, Morrison's former bandmate in The Mixers and, earlier, The Fauves,[14] Saviour provided a mix of religious themes, satire and superhero action that quickly brought Millar to the attention of the wider British comics industry and resulted in several script commissions for the long-running anthology 2000 AD and its sister title Crisis.[15]
In 1992, Trident's owner Neptune Distribution went bankrupt,[16] leaving both Saviour and The Shadowmen, Millar's second series at the publisher, unfinished. By that time, Millar already became a semi-regular contributor to 2000AD and its adjacent titles, and his output included several Robo-Hunter serials, a six-part prison story "Insiders" for Crisis, a Judge Dredd spin-off series Red Razors, as well as numerous newspaper strips starring Dredd himself for Daily Star. The following year, Millar, Morrison and writer John Smith were given editorial reins over 2000AD for an eight-week run titled "The Summer Offensive".[17] The controversial initiative resulted, among other things, in the first major story co-written by Millar and Morrison, Big Dave.[18]
In 1994, Millar crossed over to the American comic book industry, taking over the long-running series Swamp Thing, published under DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. The first four issues of his run were again co-written with Morrison, who, according to Millar, "came on board to make sure that DC selected me above anyone else pitching for the gig".[15] Although Millar's further work on Swamp Thing brought some critical acclaim to the ailing title, the book's sales were still low enough to warrant cancellation by the publisher. For the next few years, Millar continued to write sporadically for 2000AD and various American publishers, often co-scripting the stories with Morrison, with whom he shares the writing credit on the mini-series Skrull Kill Krew for Marvel, a short run on Vampirella for Harris, a year-long run on The Flash as well as Aztek: The Ultimate Man for DC.[19][20]