Miscellania 9 - World Comic Book Review

“A dream! A hoax! An imaginary story!”
The amazing team-up blog of Ross Pearsall.
Review by DG Stewart, 14 January 2015

Blogger and creative talent Ross Pearsall has been the subject of many online discussions relating to his remarkably creative and fun work in producing fictional comic book covers on the site Super-Team Family: …the Lost Issues! .

World Comic Book Review interviewed him this week.

WCBR: How long have you been doing these covers? What inspired you to do this?

Ross Pearsall: The covers began with me imagining what The Brave and the Bold would have been like if it had continued. I used MS Paint to mash up existing artwork into new imaginary covers. I tried to team Batman up only with DC characters that were published around the time the original B&B series ran, using Jim Aparo artwork whenever possible, to make the covers that I thought might have actually appeared. Upon exhausting that concept, I started to branch out, using heroes from Marvel and elsewhere. This eventually led to me switching titles, using Marvel Two-In-One, with The Thing as the anchor hero hosting rotating guest stars. People seemed to get a kick out of these when I posted them on a message board and when it was suggested I start a blog, I did so in April of 2010. After a while I decided to step things up by switching to Photoshop for creating the covers and switching the core title once again to Super Team Family, which could encompass any type of team up I could come up with. The concept I started with was – “What is Super-Team Family ran forever, with access to any character from anywhere?” That’s broad enough to allow me to feature all the characters and creators that I admire. I switched from MS Paint to Photoshop after over 500 B&B and MTIO covers and 320 or so STF covers. It was a learning curve, but eventually it opened a whole new world of possibilities for me. That said, I am proud of what I was able to accomplish with a relatively simple program like MS Paint while I was using it.

The biblical adage that nothing is ever new under the sun seems especially true in comic books. This phenomenon is sometimes cast as express homages, sometimes as sneaky or blatant efforts to piggy-back on goodwill, and sometimes as part of the creative rush to tap into the prevailing zeitgeist.

“Vertical” (published in 2004) was the last of the special formatted releases to celebrate the tenth anniversary years of DC Comic’s imprint, Vertigo. It was written by Steven T. Seagle with art by Mike Allred. The text and the art pay homage to Andy Warhol, most obviously in the excerpt above. No doubt to mitigate risk under the Lanham Act for implying an endorsement of affiliation between the comic and Warhol’s personality rights, Warhol, as a character in the comic, is referred to only as “Andy”, but lives in a place called “The Factory”, has bright blonde hair, and is clearly regarded by the characters as a shaper of opinions and style. All of this describes Warhol the person.

Mike Allred’s engaging pop art style of drawing is showcased in the clothes and hairstyles of the characters. It also uses as a stylistic vehicle a comic book genre which hadn’t been in prominence since the 60s – the comic book love/romance genre.

The art is notably avant garde. Reading the story itself is also like looking at a roll of film – the scenes are in squares and each looks like a film frame.