March M.O.D.O.K. Madness
Marto Saga (Complete)
Here's the complete "March M.O.D.O.K. Madness" Marto Saga, just to get everything together on one post, as well as show the layout pages that sort of brought everything together and shows a little bit of the "behind the scenes".
Also, here is the link to the Golden Age comic book story which inspired this whole thing: ["The Menace of MARTO" by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby; "Blue Bolt" Vol. 1, #6 (1940)] It is in the public domain and you can read it here: https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=17624
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THE PROCESS
Some of the pages below were started and drawn on separate Layers/Pages of the same document, but I gathered them altogether when it looked like it was gonna be an actual comic book story of sorts. Once I got everything together, I was doodling about and trying to figure out what to do with the (cough) storyline (if you can call it that--it's barely a scene, let alone a story, if we're being honest). Mostly, I was trying to breakdown the panels and hit the beats of the, ahem, "story".
It was only through accident that this even became a series of comic pages. To show how my brain works (again, if you can call it that), this story was built inside out, in that I had the idea for Page 2 first, where I wanted to do something with Marto and tie it in to "March M.O.D.O.K. Madness". So, the whole thing was just going to be a single drawing of Page 2, Panel 2 (later Panel 3 as explained below), where he proclaims it is now "March Marto Madness!" But, then I figured I should explain Marto was a prior creation by Joe Simon/Jack Kirby who kinda resembled M.O.D.O.K., so did Page 2, Panel 1 to backfill.
Then I thought it would be amusing to have a "Mortal Kombat" style page just as a follow-up where they slap fight it out to see whether it was "March Marto Madness" or "March M.O.D.O.K. Madness".
After that, I knew I should probably have the outcome of the battle, so that led to the idea of another page, which I quickly scrawled out the general outline/panel beats. You can see things changed a lot once I started working on pencilling the actual panels. It started with just a Mindblast when Marto's head exploding. But, as I started working on the last page, it amused me more to see Marto's head expanding and then blowing up, instead. While the last line stayed the same, I probably should have kept the draft version of "Grrrr! Well, enough of this!", rather than changing it to "Ugh! This is ridiculous!" A minor quibble, I know, but upon re-reading, I think the previous version is a bit more in the voice of M.O.D.O.K. Oh, well.
After the ending was plotted out, I thought I should probably do a page where I setup the whole situation and thought it would be neat to include the original panel introducing Marto.
Lastly, after the whole thing was setup with Page One, I realized I should change Page 2, Panel 1 to break it into two separate panels to introduce Marto from the shadows, if you will (with the two, updated panels below Page 2, below), and then introduce Marto in the larger panel, the original drawing which began this whole thing. So, everything comes full circle.
As you can tell from the changes to page one, I went from "What the H-E-Double Hockey Sticks" to the Grawlix #@!%&!. After I did that on the first page, I thought it would be amusing to have that be the end of the second page. And then the third page. Heck, why not all pages in the story end with the Grawlix?
Oh, and that led to one other minor change in Page 3, in that I thought if I ended every page with the Grawlix "What the @#$*@!", who better to exclaim it than Brendan and Pedro from the March M.O.D.O.K. Madness Blog? Brendan only had a caricature of himself online that I could find with a brief picture search, and Pedro had one pic of himself on his website. So, I used both of those as a vague reference and hoped they wouldn't be too offended by my cartoony version of them (I even set up the page so the panel in question could be excised without it changing the reading of the page--it just wouldn't have the Grawlix at the end). Instead, they said they liked it and published it as is.
I will sometimes use an ellipsis as a dialog placeholder, as in a note to myself of "Hey, Dummy, write something in here later..."
Also of note is the quick marginalia of the "Zardoz" head as M.O.D.O.K., which just sort of popped into my head, so jotted it down as a future idea. And there ya go, for better or worse, the rather messy, meandering tour of how my general creative process works (again, if you can call it that).
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Done digitally in Clip Studio Paint.
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