We received word this morning that my friend and mentor Al Williamson passed away over the weekend. I’m sitting here feeling a lot of different emotions. Loss, of course, because I’ll never get to see Al again. But also amazement at his long and productive life; the kind of wonderful person he was, the astounding talent he had and the generous way he encouraged young artists like myself to pursue our dreams of doing comics.

This blog has been mostly a visual one for the last three years, but I think I’m going to spend the next few days writing about the Al I knew and how his work affected me. I’ll spice things up with some scans of pieces of his I have or things he and I collaborated on. Here’s a page from the Alan Moore SWAMP THING/SUPERMAN crossover Al inked over my pencils in the mid 1980′s. It’s scanned from one of many foreign language versions.

Actually, I’m not sure how much wisdom was involved, but the good folks at Comicraft have just created a computer font of my comic book lettering. You can buy it, along with a gazillion other incredible fonts, over on their site.

Pencils from ARMY@LOVE: ART OF WAR #4. Magoon freaks out.

Big changes going on behind the scenes here at my blog. I’ve updated my shopping cart software and will be opening my revamped store very soon with lots of cool new products! To test out the new Paypal buttons and everything, I have this lovely cover art for sale. It’s from GREYSHIRT: INDIGO SUNSET #2. Pen and ink on DC/Wildstorm board, excellent condition. Signed by Rick Veitch.

Panel found in a thirty year old sketchbook.

A cover I did for a comics news magazine circa 1993, promoting the late lamented 1963 series.

Appreciation by Rob’sMovieVault.com

Marvel letterer and wild man artist Rick Parker dressed to the nines while taking care of the backed up plumbing at Book Expo of America. Terry Nantier and Jim Salicrup seem delighted with his choice in fashion.

Here are the inks (with some changes) to the penciled page of UNKNOWN SOLDIER #21 I ran a couple days ago. To see more and read a few comments of mine about working on this particular issue, bop over to the DC site.

I’ve just turned in the completed pencils and inks for an issue of Unknown Soldier. It’s a pretty cool story that follows a single AK47 machine gun from its manufacture in Eastern Europe in the seventies to Africa, then through the hands of its various owners to modern times. DC is putting up a three page sample of pencils and the same pages inked with a short thing I wrote about working on it.

Above are the pencils to Page 1.