This client’s request was the most bizarre one that I’d received to date! Last fall of ’02 I was asked to add to his ‘silverfish gallery’, a collection of small images of, you guessed it, silverfish. I let him know that I would need to put the project aside until I could find the available time. This finally occurred in February when I was suddenly between assignments so I took the project on. But call me ambitious, call me pretentious (heck, call me greedy), I told the client that I wanted to do a TALES TO ASTONISH Antman & the Wasp retro cover with “The Silverfish” as the latest Silver-age comic threat. And this idea wouldn’t really work, as far as I was concerned, on a small scale like an index card or letter-sized paper so the client agreed to me doing it all on 11X17 comic cover art board like an actual cover (although, to be really picky about it, silver-age cover art was done even larger back then). I then put together a loose conceptual sketch and, with apologies to Jack Kirby, rendered and inked the work with some swipe art, altering my original sketch somewhat while the work was in progress, and then, in my best impression of Stan Lee (again, apologies), I traced and rendered the titles copy and then I typed up and pasted down the rest of the copy.

I finally photocopied/pasted up the comics code stamp and ‘Marvel Comics Group, 12 cents’. I finished the commission on 2/10/03 using mostly brush with some marker but I limited my use of straight edges and templates to a minimum to match the subject matter. Had this not meant to be in a retro style I definitely would have tried different SFX for the shadow and textures rarely used in the ’60s. And I wish I could’ve put some ‘Kirby crackle’ into the composition without it looking gratuitous.