Insect Asides, Part Six ~~ A "Comical Wednesday" Post

I did not show this sequence in my last chapter of "Insect Asides," but at the end of Insect Man's Weird Tales #98, Rex "Insect Man" Mason burst into Brian Harvey's office with a piece of paper. On it was the location of SKULL's main stronghold, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. I never specified if this paper contained the longitude and latitude of SKULL Island, or if it was a map. Rex explained that somehow, Hur-Bi (the alien from Menro-6) had slipped the paper into Rex's Insect Man glove!

Of course, that raised the question of how Hur-Bi had that information...

Anyway... I figured issue #100 would be the issue to have the final battle between SKULL and Counter-SKULL. And I had a few other ambitious plans for that issue as well. (More on that later.)

So..... What could I do for #99?

Issue #100 was going to have a lot of death and destruction, so I decided to make IMWT #99 another silly issue, as #97 had been.

This wasn't too long after Coca-Cola had replaced its oh-so-successful ninety-nine-year-old formula with a new one. If you weren't alive then, you have no idea how big a story this was at the time.

Anyway, I came up with a twist on the story. Coca-Cola has their official version of what happened. I had mine.

I don't know how it was decided that my best friend at the time, Dave, would draw the issue I'd scripted. Y'see... Dave wasn't really an artist! And I definitely don't know who thought it would be a good idea for me to ink Dave's pencils. After all, I was also a "non-artist."

I decided to ink and letter Dave's pencils using a pseudonym of "D.W. Cranston."

I had come up with a cover idea that I thought was pretty creative, and I drew that.

Now, remember, "Dave wasn't really an artist." That became even more apparent when he handed me the pages for the issue's interior. Quite frankly, they were pretty bad. It then, horribly, became my responsibility to try to improve the issue with my own terrible inking "skills." I basically had to redraw the whole freakin' issue. And! I! Couldn't! Draw!

It was okay that the issue was going to be drawn "cartoony," because it was a silly issue. But bad cartoony is never acceptable.

Therefore, I'll spare you the sight of that issue's artwork... almost.

I do want to show you one panel which I had suggested to Dave. The one below:

It was a swipe from a Neal Adams panel that appeared in "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge!" from Batman #251.

I'll also spare you the whole story of the "New Coke" debacle. But here's the very last page of the story:

That "It's a hit" line, by the way, was a slogan from old Coca-Cola ads. You can almost/kinda/sorta read "It's a Hit" on this old jackknife.

Usually, issues of Insect Man's Weird Tales consisted of a cover and a seven-page story. But the actual story of "The Kola Konspiracy" was only six pages (plus a cover) so we could run the following ad (which was also drawn and lettered by "D.W. Cranston"):

"Let's all be there" was the 1984-1985 season slogan for the NBC-TV network. Just sayin'.

That's right! I had come up with the ambitious idea to have every single artist who'd ever drawn Insect Man contribute to issue #100. (At least, I think it was my idea. If it was Paul Howley's, Ken Carson's, or any combination of the three of us, my apologies to whomever it was! I'm not trying to grab undeserved credit.)

That was a coordinative nightmare! Not only that, but as the accumulated artists started turning in their pages, what had been planned as a (maybe) 24-page issue swelled to become twice that size!

How did we handle that, you may wonder?

Well, time was really tight for me this week, so I had to make today's chapter relatively short. Catch you next week, fellow babies!

And thanks for your time.

Insect Man, Insect Man's Weird Tales, and all related characters and titles are copyright © Paul B. Howley.