Soft, Rubbery, Wonder Woman Art

When I started doing the Mego Museum in 1996 I had just graduated from art school with a degree in illustration. I had been interested in editorial illustration, the conceptual kind of stuff you see in magazine and newspapers, as well as graphic novel comic book art, both of which are among the most competitive fields there are. I quickly discovered that if I was to have any chance at regular work I'd need to learn what I had avoided in art school: "Computer art". The Mego Museum was a place I got to practice these new, awkward skills with complete freedom and the original gallery art in the Museum is the work of a fairly competent novice. One of my favorites is the Wonder Woman painting. It's a tour of everything I loved about the program Fractal Painter---the "cloud" brush, the "image hose" that splatters leaves all around, the filters that give an easy metallic 3D look, and of course the faux marble look on the easy-to-draw classical column. Today it looks very underdone to me--more of a concept sketch really, but at the time I was impressed with my "low-rent version of Myst" as I called it. It fit the Mego Wonder Woman very well, and the golden Mego body goddess statues of Paradise Island were very clever.

I wish I was as pleased with the eventual Wonder Woman Trading card! I can't recall why I chose to do her for the 3rd card. Probably because I had a clearest idea for her background than the others. I was still experimenting with the graphic photo technique and there is this fake Grecian temple type structure down the street at Oakland's Lake Merritt. I'm pretty sure that Brian Heiler had asked for some more WGSH cards on a very short deadline and I figured I could bang out a WW pretty quickly. Indeed, I seem to have taken all of two pictures of the doll (by the end of the run I'd be taking 20-40 of each figure trying to get the perfect lighting, pose and focus). So the whole card is a bit undercooked to me.

What is most significant about this card is the back. I mentioned in my last post that we used Mego's own black and white reproduction art on the first two cards, but this wasn't sustainable because few characters had good repro art. 12 inch Wonder Woman was the best you could get here. So I pushed the posterized graphic photograph technique to make a black and white "repro drawing" of the doll. At this point I want to acknowledge the source of inspiration here. When the Museum's own Tom Bligh published his wonderful account of his trip to MegoCon and his seduction into Mego collecting in the ultra-hip literary magazine The Believer it reminded me that there were cool things to be done with Mego and it helped get me interested in coming back to work on the Museum. The article was prominently featured on the cover by a fantastic drawing of the Mego Wonder Woman head by the legendary underground illustrator Charles Burns. His ink beautiful ink portrait in his distinctive style, complete with the little holes for the hair rooting on the doll--contained in the circle, was a definite influence on how I did the portraits on the back of the trading cards. So while I'm not so happy with the Wonder Woman front, the card back was a big breakthrough. The portraits are a big part of the fun of the cards and the look was used on the Instruction Sheet map of the Mego Museum and in other ways as well.

So that's the story of card #3. I keep saying this, but I will have news about the return of Dida Displays very soon! Stay tuned.

My favorite Mego Museum Trading Cards. Or, Why I Collect Megos.

I called this blog the Mego Museum Art Department and not just the Dida Display blog because I wanted a place to post about the work I have done at the Museum, but with the difficulties with the Displayset production I had a bit of a slowdown after Mego Meet. I make no guarantees that there will be another post from the Art Department, but it's possible!

Two threads at the newly refurbished Mego Museum Forums got me thinking... The first was one that's come and gone dozens of times but is always fun and interesting: Why Do You Collect Megos? It's a question I ask myself often, sometimes in exasperation. My answer to the second thread, Which is your favorite MM trading card? actually helps answer the first question for me.

The trading card discussion was remarkable in that responses seemed to lean toward the person's favorite character, naturally enough. However, no one mentioned the Superman or Spider-man cards; Two favorite characters, two favorite Megos, two somewhat overlooked cards.

While they are prized for their rarity (we only made 500 of them) they tend to get short shrift because they aren't as exciting and dynamic as the later cards are. So, I'd like to give them their due.

In the fall of 2005 I was in the middle of overhauling the Mego Museum after a 5 year hiatus. Brian Heiler had done a heroic job growing the site into one of the best vintage toy archives on the web but he was hamstrung by the site's outdated format. So over the course of several months I developed the logo and templates that gave the place a fresher, more cohesive look and much improved navigation. For me it was a great feeling to finish something I had left undone and correct something that had always bothered me. So in the middle of this Brian emails and asks if I have a larger resolution version of the old Spider-Man gallery image. He and Steve Leach (MegoSteve) are putting together a trading card to promote the Museum.

I was immediately excited by the idea and inspired by the perfectly retro design that Steve had done on the back, but I had two concerns. First, I wanted the card to reflect the new look of the Museum that would debut in a few months, and more importantly, I couldn't live with that old Spider-man image printed and scattered across the world. Not only was it very low resolution and not printable, but it, like all of the gallery art, had been made when I was just learning Photoshop and digital art and I really wanted to improve it.

To do these two cards I was faced with a very short deadline. Brian was getting a sweet deal adding these cards to another print run so I had to work fast. Fortunately, Steve had put together a strong basic design that I was able to plug into the new Museum treatment.

This first rough used a Conan I happened to have photographed and I think I may have toyed with the idea of having one standard color for all the cards, thus Conan with primary colors from the Museum front page. I saw immediately that the only way to go was to use the various colors Mego used for the packaging art. I had recently gone on a spree of buying carded WGSH and I had picked up the love of the Mego color scheme from Benjamin Holcomb who can wax rhapsodic about Mego packaging colors (and wrote a book about it!).

I think it was a crucial decision. It grounded the cards in the Mego history and aesthetic while allowing us to use our own logos and iconography. Much as I love the classic Mego images and character logos I didn't want to have to deal with getting, for example, the Green Goblin's iconography off his box and incorporating it into a card design. Much easier to use the same template and simply plug in the colors accordingly. This eventually led me down the tortuous road of color-coding each character's page in Cascading Style Sheets, but it was worth it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We always shake or heads when we contemplate the number of Mego cards we have made, because when this first started it was intended to be a one shot deal, but I think it was clear to me early on that this would have to continue to it's logical end. I really wanted to be able to replace the gallery art for the figures and this was the way to do it. So the other crucial decision I made on the first cards was to develop a background style that I could live with. Generating 38-plus Super Hero images was going to be hard enough without drawing or painting that many original backgrounds. Fortunately, I didn't have any time at all to do the first two cards and was forced to find a treatment that would be quick--thus making dozens of subsequent cards possible.

So after shooting the figures in the backyard sunlight I went my iPhoto library and found a bunch of shots of downtown San Francisco I had taken and grabbed a couple of likely backgrounds. I brought them into Photoshop and applied a few filter effects (Poster edges, posterize, find edges) and tried to reduce the images down to a graphic style that plausibly looked like comic art. I was frankly a little embarrassed to be relying on such cheap out of the box tricks, but at the same time I was excited by the possibilities if not the results. These first images are fairly tame and unimaginative, and as the project wore on I became more creative and achieved more dynamic results. I am glad that I stuck to limiting the color scheme of the background art the the character's colors, it gave the series a continuity and a challenge as things progressed.

For the back of the cards we kept MegoSteve's original work, and that is why they look somewhat unique from the rest. Spidey and Superman's cards use Mego "Repro Art" images, a brilliant choice on Steve's part because of how important line art was in toy marketing back in the 70's. But with so many characters and only so much decent repro clips I would have to develop a different treatment for the line art, but that's another story.

All very interesting, but how does that really explain why
I collect Megos?

Well, yeah, the creative outlet they've given me has been wonderful. I feel very lucky to have accidentally become the artist at the MegoMuseum. All along, with these cards, with the old gallery art and the old clunky web pages I was always trying to get across what these toys meant to me.

There's something about this picture of Superman flying in the back yard that says it all for me. The crinkly red cape, the puffy sleeves, the kind, reassuring face...and the boots--those big clunky red plastic rainboots. To someone who didn't have Megos or spend much time with them it's just a Superman figure: Goofy, lame, charming, innocent, old-fashioned, nostalgic whatever adjective fits. But for myself and many of my fellows---this is a face that I spent a lot of time looking into at very close range as a kid does when playing with a favorite toy and when I saw one again after 10 years it was like meeting an old friend. The weight of the figure, the shape of that boot, the texture of the costume all adds up to something vaguely remembered but impossible to forget. This guy is a friend of mine, that's all I can say.

I guess that's one of the best things about the trading cards: The spirit of friendship they've taken on. They've been freely given away by dozens of Megoheads to hundreds more---always with the invitation to come to the Museum and make friends. So while this version of Superman and Spiderman may not have gotten the deluxe treatment they really did their job.

I'm going to sign off now before this gets any cornier. I hope to have some more news about Dida Displays soon and I'd like to revisit a few other trading cards in the future.