Guy tells me I can email my blog posts so I am giving it a try today.
In 1985 I somehow got an appointment with Editor Sal Amendola at DC
Comics in New York City to try out for comic book inking assignments.
Tom and Mary Bierbaum swung that interview, thank you again folks, even
though we never met. Tom and Mary were writing a comic strip called
"Woofer and Tweeter" drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger for DC, it wasn't
inked at that point, and they knew I was trying to become a professional
inker and that I was a student of Kurt's art. Kurt was one of the
original Captain Marvel artists at Fawcett in the 1940s, but he was best
known as the "Lois Lane" artist for DC in the 1960s.
I showed up for the interview with a lampoon page of Lois Lane which Mr.
Amendola loved (Still have it, I'll show it here another time). Sal
Amendola was a professional artist himself, I remember complimenting him
on some Atlas comics he'd done (and for which apparently he was never
paid). Long story short, he gave me a bunch of photocopied 11 x 17 inch
pages to try my hand at inking, including a few Archie comics which I
did my best to ignore, and a few Woofer and Tweeter pages by Kurt
Schaffenberger.
I traced all the photocopies and redrew them, and also drew this cover
from scratch for a comic book called "Elvira's House of Mystery" which I
knew Sal Amendola was editing at the time. It was unsollicited of
course, I just wanted to get his attention.
Anyway, I sent my art by air mail only to find out a couple of weeks
later that Sal Amendola had left the company! He was replaced by Ed
Hannigan, who never bothered opening mail.
My friend Ken Gale who lives in New York City, who has always been a bit
of a rebel, stormed the offices of DC Comics to retrieve my artwork a
year later, and unbelievably, he left the offices with my mailing tube
unopened. He checked out my art and mailed everything back intact. A prince.
So here is an unpublished Elvira comic book cover by Bert Blood from 1985.
Cheers!
Bert
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