#jim hanley

[browsethestacks]

Vintage Fanzine - Fantasticomix #03

Pencils: Jim Hanley Inks: Jim Hanley Back Cover: Clyde Caldwell MOB Graphic Communions (1973)

[vhs-ninja]

Hot Water (1985).

[evandorkin]

Princess Python Stand-Up Figure, from around 1984 or so. Inked (amateurishly) with rapidographs on Bristol board, colored (poorly) with Dr. Martin's Dyes. Assembled with mat board, glue and wooden coffee stirrers.

I made this and a bunch of other little stand-up figures back in the 80's when I worked at a Staten Island comic shop called The Fantastic Store (originally called The Merchant of Venus, believe it or not). These figures stood around 5" on average, I'm guessing. Most of them were Marvel and DC superheroes, although I made a few of my own characters (from the Champions role-playing game campaign I played with my friends) and some space aliens who were prototypes of the stowaways from Pirate Corp$!/Hectic Planet. Originally the figures were just little cut-out paper doll-like things. I don't remember why I started making them in the first place, but I made five of them and showed them to Jim Hanley at the Fantastic Store, the shop he co-owned before opening Jim Hanley's Universe. I was a regular at the shop, I ended up getting a job there, became a manager, and was eventually (and rightfully) fired for being a jerk (actually, I was fired a bunch of times, including once for twisting a tire iron into a kid's back, but this was the one that stuck. Jim hired me back when he opened JHU, but that's another story. Or a bunch of stories, I guess).

Anyway, I left the five little Marvel character cut-outs with Jim as decorations for the counter. A day or two later Jim called me up to ask if I would be willing to sell them, because a customer asked if they were for sale. I was more than willing, and I sold them for a whopping $20, solid comic book and movie money at the time. I ended up making more figures to sell at the shop, and pretty soon after that first sale I started making stands for them so they'd be easier to display. I attached the paper figures to a stand cut from mat board and propped them up with wooden coffee stirrers and glue. I stole handfuls of stirrers from shops around NYU, where I was going to college at the time. I'm sure there were much better ways to produce the figures, I'd make five or six at a time on a piece of Bristol and then ink them, color them with Doc Martin murder spirits and cut them out and mount them. They took a long time and I'm sure the money was lousy if you broke it down to an hourly wage, which is pretty much how I still make stuff thirty some-odd years later. Ha ha.

I ended up making over 90 stand-up figures, I have the list on a big index card floating around here somewhere. Mostly I drew whatever superhero or villain I felt like drawing, but sometimes customers commissioned figures, I think I did a few role-playing game characters from Champions and D&D for people. I know I did a bunch of X-Men characters, they were still the number one big deal thing going at the time. I did a figure of Phoenix with the Phoenix effect behind her, a major achievement for me at the time which I'm sure was actually way-horrible in all it's Byrne/Perez-inspired fanboy glory. Anyway, I made a lot of these paper action figures over a fairly short amount of time. A few months, maybe. Jim and his partner Dave let me have a whole shelf for them, eventually they let me sell superhero pin-ups as well. The store got a small cut, if I remember correctly. It was a pretty swell deal.

After a while I decided to quit making them, though. It got pretty tiresome to make the damned things, getting them to stand up was a pain in the ass, and the pin-up drawings were easier to produce and earned better money. So I decided to wind up the run with a series of all of Galactus' heralds and then finish up with an over-sized Galactus figure, which would be in scale with all the other figures. The biggest figure I'd done at that point was a Sentinel and I wanted to go out on a high note. I ended up going out on no note, because I crapped out and never did the last batch of figures. I forget why I bailed. No one lost any sleep over it. 

I don't have any of the figures, myself. I kept one, a villain from my Champions game called The Mutable Man, but he's gone missing. I probably threw him out or he got ruined and tossed. I remembered there was a colored but unfinished Rhino figure that we kept in the Fantastic Store cash register -- I wonder what happened to him. The Princess Python picture posted above was sent to me a while back by someone who won it on eBay, if I remember correctly. I stumbled across the photo in my files and it made me want to post about it. Somewhere in my flat art files I have a xerox of a batch of figures that were in the inking stage. If I find those maybe I'll scan them and post them if anyone's interested. They'll be as embarrassing as the Princess Python, I'm sure. What's with her legs? I thought she had three badly-drawn legs, but then I realized one was an effect of the lousy coloring. Ugh ugh ugh. Some people thought I was a good artist back then. So did I. Yeesh!

One last thing. It turned out that the person who bought those first five figures was actually Jim Hanley. The customer who wanted them was a teenager whose mother balked when he told her he wanted $20 to buy some stupid little superhero drawings from some stupid little local nobody. So the sale fell through. Jim felt badly about it so he just clammed up and bought them himself. And hid them, I guess, He told me about it some time after. I always thought that was a really nice thing to do, it's always meant a lot to me. 

I wonder if he still has them.