ARMANDO GIL.COM

Ka-Zar

Brent Andersons work was fun to work on and then when he left, or got taken off, they had an inventory of pencils that had been done and they decided all of a sudden, out of nowhere, to throw these issues in.

The issue were Belasco shows up, where they had the two balls on his forehead [laughter] which I think was the inspiration for Hellboy [laughter] there was a panel where I did a transparency overlay and I taped it to the page so the printers could use that as a colour knock-out, and somehow the overlay got lost so the first print run had a word balloon with no-one there. [laughter] That was funny, so they had to print it again with the panel. Then I got a chance to draw two issues, I pencilled and inked one issues of Ka-Zar, issue #27, Twisted Corridors, and I did the wrap around cover to it also and I really liked it and got a lot of good reviews on it. I started pencilling the second one and they said, "Armando, you're having problems meeting deadlines, why don't you get someone to ink it?" I thought, "Will who would be faithful?" I bumped into this young kid who was looking for work and I hooked him up with Larry Hama to see if I could get him some work, took him to lunch and I said, "Well why don't you ask Mike Mignola to ink it then?" This was before Mike Mignola developed his more graphic style, he was doing this wispy Wrightson thing, and I thought he'd enhance the pencils but I was wrong.

About the cover, I lived in the East Village at the time and I was surrounded by this new wave art, so I was getting into patterns, designs, nothing that the layperson would be interested in but it was a challenge of mine and I wanted the eye of the volcano to look like the sun and Ka-Zar flying with these Ka-Zar made wings with Sheena in front of it. I had his arms stretched up in this really cool way and I thought the cover was going to be great because the two other wrap around covers I'd done I thought were great. I looked at this and thought it'd be cool and they'd love it. Jim Shooter saw it and he had someone in the production department almost cut Ka-Zar's arms off and bend them down with the wings and it totally looks like crap. I got emotional, I even cried a little up at Marvel and I thought that Jim Shooter even had it in for me. I asked him, "Why are you picking on me? It's just a cover and it looks cool. People will like it, they don't care." I got kicked off Ka-Zar, not because of the cover but because of the deadlines.

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