I met Mike Jones when we were both graduate students at Louisiana Tech. I was getting a DBA in Management with minors in Marketing and Industrial Psychology, and Mike was getting his MFA in Graphic Design. My dissertation had the riveting title An Analysis of Factors Proposed to Affect the Decision to Blow the Whistle on Unethical Acts. Mike’s thesis included a written portion which was about comic book art and a 16-page black and white comic book. Suffice it to say that his thesis looked like a lot more fun than my dissertation. It was about a superhero called the Locust. I still have a copy.
Mike and I both chose higher education as a means of supporting ourselves rather than follow the starving artist path. In the time I’ve known him, Mike has taught graphic design in Houghton, New York; Arkadelphia, Arkansas; and Abilene, Texas, where he is now.
Some of Mike’s childhood inspirations were Hanna-Barbera cartoons like Jonny Quest, the Fantastic Four, Space Ghost, and the Herculoids. He was also a big fan of Lost in Space and Star Trek. You can see those passions in some of the work he has done since then. When Mike and I were in graduate school together, he had already done a Star Trek parody with ducks that he called Star Quack. It featured characters like Captain Quack, Mr. Squawk, Dr. DeCoy, and Spotty journeying through space in a giant metal duck. He has three Star Quack stories available on Comixology now.
Mike had a dream of writing new stories about the Hanna-Barbera characters, but found out DC Comics had purchased the rights. He has contacted them about doing some work for them, but hasn’t had any luck so far. It looks like they’re finally doing something with those characters in the Future Quest series, so I hope he’ll get a chance to work with them eventually. Meanwhile, Mike has created his own universe of characters that is inspired by those classic cartoons. In many cases, I thought his characters were better developed than the original inspirations. He has published the first issue as Omni-Men (also on Comixology). His Omni-Men website is still under construction in spots, but I love what he’s doing with it. It’s like a love letter to the Saturday morning cartoons of the sixties and seventies. He has old style channel guides and theme music that would go with the shows if they were animated.
It sounds ironic, but I’ve even found some of Mike’s disappointment stories interesting. Two or three years ago, I saw that American Gothic Press, an independent comic book company, was publishing a Lost in Space: The Lost Episodes comic based on a collection of scripts that were written for the original series in the 1960s but never made into episodes. I immediately thought of Mike when I saw the magazine and texted him about it. He was way ahead of me. Mike responded by sending me three pages of art he had sent to the editors of that magazine. He had tried out to do the art in that comic, but the editors had chosen someone else. He was frustrated by the near miss, but I was impressed. I had the comic right in front of me, and he had sent me his versions of pages I could open to. I thought, “Oh, my gosh! This is great!” Disappointments aside, it impressed me that he was in the thick of the action. I told him I thought it would pay off eventually. And I do.
Mike has had some other interesting projects. He has long been a fan of Steve Rude. I have copies of Rude’s The Incredible Hulk vs. Superman, X-Men: Children of the Atom, and World’s Finest (about Superman and Batman) graphic novels in my archives. Mike has gotten a chance to work with Rude doing some design work for his studio. You’ll notice he has some Steve Rude features in his Omni-Man comics, including Rude’s versions of some of his characters.
One non-superhero project Mike did was a history comic for the Red River Valley Museum in Vernon, Texas. It came out as a very nice western/frontier comic, and he has samples of it on his website. I think you can see why I get inspired looking at Mike’s work.
Mike’s Website: http://www.mikejonesjr.net
Comics: http://www.mikejonesjr.net/#illustrator