Me Draw Pretty Some Day

A reminiscence by Tim Hamilton, an illustrator and cartoonist who has been published in the New York Times, MAD Magazine, Nickelodeon Magazine, assorted DC and Marvel Comics, and a lot of other places. He adapted Stevenson's Treasure Island for Puffin Books and John Marquand's (one of Will and Gerry's favorite writers!) Mr. Moto for Moonstone Books. He is now writing and drawing the stunning Adventures of the Floating Elephant for the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate.


Imagine it if you can. Way, way back before Star Wars Prequels, before the internet, back around the time a strange new “fourth network” entity known as the “Fox Television Network” was just a pool of swirling, congealing peptides. It was 1987 and I was a poor artist in Pittsburgh, PA fresh out of a two-year art program looking for work. At this time, the comic book industry was going through a period known as the “Black and White Explosion.” There were many small companies popping up and publishing alternatives to Marvel and DC’s mainstream super hero lines.

But that’s another story.

In fact, me getting my first job in comics is another story too. This story is about my very first art job out of school. After graduation, my roommates and I had no phone, of course no internet and in fact, no hot water for showers! We took many trips into the job placement office of our school and stunk the place up while we looked through all the terrible art jobs we never heard of while in school. The list included: illustrating the packaging of no-name brand toys, drawing line art for teddy bear coloring books and even testing out new drugs. Yes, drug testing. The woman on the phone at the pharmaceutical company sounded so cute we almost did that for a weekend!

Where were the animation jobs?! Movie and TV set design jobs? Why wouldn’t Marvel Comics hire me??! They must have received my amazing sample packet by now!

In a depressed state, my friends and I often bought as many six packs of Mickey’s Big Mouth as we could afford and drank away our sorrows. It often ended with someone breaking one of our Betamax tapes and me throwing up in the bathtub.

Finally though, after months of self-pity, a ray of hope arrived in the job placement office. A charming fellow, who I’ll call “Ted,” came to our school and recruited artists to help him start a new gaming company. This was something we could sink our teeth into! Illustrating wizards, trolls and creatures who could take 100 hit points before dying! Ted hired me and a few others with starting salaries of 30,000 a year and promises of a new gaming empire! We immediately went out, got ourselves a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth and celebrated until someone broke my Walkman while I threw up in the bathroom sink.

We should have been suspicious of Ted when, to meet with him, we had to take three buses out to rural Pittsburgh (picture that house where Buffalo Bill lived in Silence of the Lambs). Ted seemed to live with his aging mother who sat silent in the living room watching hit shows like Family Ties and St. Elsewhere while we drew characters like White Dust Wizard and Magical Mushroom Monsters. Of course, after a month or so of illustrating fantasy kingdoms and wondering why Ted always seemed to have the sniffles, it became apparent we were not going to get paid. The school looked into his past for us and found that not everything he said was quite true. No he did NOT play for the Dallas cowboys, help in the creation of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show or write a proposed spin off of Cheers called “Carla and Kids.” He flipped out when he found out we had looked into his past. He had his mother write us a terse note informing us he could no longer work for people who did not trust him, and who were unwilling to wait a few years for our first pay checks.



My friend Eric, who did quite a bit of writing for this new gaming company, refused to let Ted get off that easy. Without the internet mind you, using only telephones and … well, just telephones, he found out that Ted was actually wanted by the F.B.I! Seems he had been running seminars (the kind that people pay to get into) at hotel conference rooms and then skipping town without paying the hotel among other things. Eric set up a meeting with Ted under the guise of wanting to patch things up and give him all the writing he’d done for the new game they had been creating. They were to meet at Eides Comics in downtown Pittsburgh. When Ted came into the store, undercover F.B.I. agents were milling all about the place pretending to be interested in the latest issue of Watchmen or Dark Horse Presents. Ted was quickly led off in handcuffs as Eric snapped pictures while customers at Eides went back to continually asking the employees if issue four of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight had arrived yet.



As we sat and raised our collective glasses of Jack Daniels (the lure of Mickey’s Big mouth had worn off) to celebrate a lesson well learned, I talked of Malibu/ Eternity Comics, the new comic company I just found out I was going to work for. I was going to do a book called The Trouble with Girls, while classmate and future Spider-Girl artist Pat Olliffe was going to illustrate a book called Strike Force for the same company.



“No more working for undependable people who would not pay!” I exclaimed. “In a few months, after they see my published work, Marvel or DC would be knocking on my door asking me to illustrate Star Brand or Ambush Bug!” You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but that night someone busted our record player as I puked on the bathroom floor slightly to the left of the toilet.

At that moment, some where in New York City, future ACT-I-VATE founder Dean Haspiel and writer Martin Powell approached Malibu/ Eternity comics with an idea called, The Verdict.

But that’s a story for another time.



And just to prove that Tim did indeed learn to draw pretty, here are the first two pages of Adventures of the Floating Elephant—though they look a lot better full-size: