Process: 1963 Is Coming!
And Affable Al has left the building ...
The first visual anyone would have seen for Alan Moore’s “triumphant return to [superhero] comics” would have been my house ad announcing 1963 from Image Comics. The brainchild of Rick Veitch and Steve Bissette and backed by Shadowhawk Image partner Jim Valentino, I was designated letterer.
I’m not sure which Image Comics the ad ran in—Shadowhawk would be a good guess—but it was the only piece of art related to 1963 that I created all by myself. Later, I lettered half the stories and covers, created other logos, and inked the Rick Veitch story of the Captain America avatar, USA—Ultimate Secret Agent.
I tell the full story of how I got involved—and how 1963 might not have happened at all without me—in my afterword to X-Amount of Comics: 1963 (WhenElse?!) Annual (Fantagraphics Underground, 2023).
I had forgotten Eric Vincent colored the ad until Anthony Smith reminded me of it recently, and sent me a scan of Eric’s color guide. Eric and Anthony created Alien Fire for Kitchen Sink Press, their science fiction epic that appeared alongside my own Border Worlds back in 1986 and 1987. Both series were canceled on the same day for slightly different reasons, but basically market neglect.
Anthony also possess a number of files and correspondence from Eric concerning Alien Fire and other projects. Anthony was the source for Eric’s original coloring used in Fantagraphics 2021 edition of In Pictipia, and the superb quality of the remastering couldn’t have been possible without it.
1963 continues to generate a great deal of interest more than thirty years after it’s initial (and incomplete) 1993 run. Most of the original six issues are easy to come by in dollar bins—certainly the first three or four; the last two are somewhat more scarce.
My “1963” logo from this ad appeared on all six issues, by the way—which is why I’m happy to autograph all six, even though my lettering otherwise only appears in four.
Jim Lee, who publicly promised to draw the annual, instead lured weak-willed “Affable Al” away to write his own proprietary comics, later selling them back to DC. Attempts even to collect the extant six issues have come to nothing, although there is a terrific Alex Ross cover still floating around on the internet.