If you have any short statements about Agents of Atlas for issue 5, leave them here and I may be able to get them in the last issue. Yes, I know it’s a little late to start a letter column, but hey.

Today is when it all blows up- do not miss these issues! You’ll want to read Avengers Academy first for the crossover, Thunderbolters. And Atlas fans, don’t get hysterical in the comments, I don’t want to have to bring you water and a paper bag to breathe into.

Over at Robot 6! I’ll put the image up a little later. If you want to, chime in over there.

To celebrate the news of Gabriel Hardman and I stomping into the reins over at HULK, I thought I’d do a giveaway. I’m feeling magnanimous (and crowded by single issues) so I’m going to give the FIRST 70 people who send their address to my rarely-looked at gmail a random signed comic that I wrote. I can’t personalize it because I’ve already put these things in stamped envelopes, and I can’t send you a particular one because they’re already sealed. I only ask one thing…

PROMISE ME (and stop crossing fingers behind your back, I can see through your computer) you’ll have your comics shop or service hold you a copy of HULK #25! Especially if you’re not the kind of person who reads Hulk, red or otherwise. I want a shot at convincing you.

NOTE- Only 10 will be going overseas because that could be a lot of filling out international forms! So you can try, but odds are better if you’re in the States.

UPDATE: I HAVE MORE THAN PLENTY, HALT!! But thanks!-JP

Things start heating up in both books, so bundle ‘em.

And you can go pick it up TODAY.

Today I spoke to Chris Sims at Comics Alliance about the new GORILLA-MAN #1 and… the news about ATLAS #5. Go read it. And here’s the Modest Mouse mood song that has too many swears for CA to link to.

I just want to thank all of you who have been following us all along and sharing the book with friends, it means more than you know. But better we get a chance to do a big bang up ending- and there are some big surprises on the way by issue 4- than a bunch of desperate bids for numbers and never get to tell the stories Atlas does best. I’ll speak more on it in the comments later, I’m hungry and need to go write this thing.

Unlettered, yet boss!

Go get ‘em! I got lucky and got one of the Ramona Fradon covers. If you don’t know her, she’s an industry legend and designed the character Metamorpho. But what’s weird is that NAMORA and RAMONA are anagrams.

I’ll go back and put in art this week, I have a headcold and it’s late. Plus, deadlines. Yet, I couldn’t do anything else until I got these thoughts down. –JP

Al Williamson has left us after years of declining health. There are many people I need to take the time out and thank for contributing to this career I’m in, you may have read me talking about the late Dave Stevens apparently people have to be gone before I talk about how much they meant to me. I should write several pages about what Berni Wrightson or Don Newton did for me through their work when I was a teenager. But the one I put at the beginning when it comes to meeting an influence was Al Williamson. I know I’ve mentioned the day a thousand times to friends, but I never tire of remembering it.

First, let me back up further and thank John Hitchcock of the comics shop Parts Unknown in Greensboro, NC. At the time he was with ACME Comics over on Lee Street and instrumental in bringing out convention guests whom he was interested in meeting, largely the creators who worked for EC Comics in the 1950s. For this reason, by sheer luck of growing up in a state known largely for tobacco and textiles, I got to meet giants of the comics industry. Talents like George Evans and Harvey Kurtzman, Angelo Torres… there was no reason I should have been able to get an audience with these people, but someone else’s tastes made it happen. And I loved those books. My horrible imitations of Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson could stop a bullet if stacked together. So one weekend in ’88 I drove down to the Piedmont only 20 miles from where I grew up and nervously took a stack of pages into the Acmecon.

Here, I’ll note that I realize probably 88% of people reading this are thinking “you used to draw?” That’s no loss, what is tragic is that about the same number think only of Al Williamson as a guy who inked a lot of Marvel Comics. What he was though was one of the major talents to ever grace the field. Even if you didn’t know his work, you felt his influence elsewhere in pop culture, one of the most apparent being what everyone in Star Wars is running around wearing. Appropriately, they came to him to draw the newspaper strip later. Some of my all time favorite Williamson work is three issues of Flash Gordon he drew in the ’60′s. To look at his work as a young artist is an exercise in frustration; he was such a virtuoso that in trying to learn from him, you get caught up in a lot of execution beyond the part you need to be focusing on. Those brush lines are enchanting and you want to go right to them, forgetting that Al knew how to do the figure, staging and powerful composition first. I spent many hours wondering why I couldn’t make a Windsor Newton brush do these things. I’m sure I was up late the night before working on pages I was going to show him.

When you’ve blown up an artistic hero in your head, it’s always an experience to seem them sitting at a table near you, being real people. I got that bumped up yet another level as Al looked over my pages and chuckled at a panel where I’d drawn the alien lizard kid from his old EC story. These pages would be hard for me or anyone to look at now, but the important thing I’d done right without realizing it was to not be the 7000th kid to shove superhero pages under his nose. Most of it was attempts at the kind of adventure strips he’d read since being a kid himself growing up in Columbia (and thus pulling off better jungle vegetation and lizards in his environments than oh, anyone). But here’s where the experience went on to dominate my psychological landscape. After some nodding, he realized that the line was building for him to sign books. Instead of handing back my art he put it to the side and said “come back around and sit down.”

I don’t know if you ever had Chuck Yeager say “Come on, climb up in the Bell X-1″ or Louie Armstrong tell you to grab a horn and sit in with him, but that would have to be how it feels.

Al never really had much of a break to go over my art with me, but that hardly mattered. He had invited me to come sit on the other side of the table, the first time I’d ever seen the world from that side. With him. I got in a little small talk though, and he gave me his address and said to come by if I managed to get up around Pennsylvania some time. That next summer, I saw to it that I got up around Pennsylvania.

This was essentially a pilgrimage. I planned out a trip through Washington culminating at Al’s house with my friend Micah Harris who I worked with on comics in school. At some point we confirmed the visit with Al, who mentioned that newcomer Mark Schultz of some Xenozoic Tales book lived nearby in Allentown, he could call him down or we should stop by there too. I still love that Al considered Mark able to drop whatever and run over- which I’m sure he would have been happy to do had Al asked. So we headed up, and in fact did meet Mark and Denise Schultz by stopping and looking him up in the phone book, as Micah just reminded me at the HeroesCon last week. I clearly was the master of tact, essentially inviting myself to people’s houses if they did comics I liked. That alone was important as I’m happy to still be friends with the Schultzes after all this time. Before the internet, it actually was a special thing to run into more people who appreciated the same things in art and story, and that was a great evening.

The visit to Al’s the next day was not as happy, no way to revise it otherwise. He was in a very low mood-his oldest son had died a couple of years back, and that was weighing on him as it must have constantly. We briefly met his then studio-mate Bret Blevins as he was on the way out the door. Our incessant questions about his friends Wally Wood, Roy Krenkel, and anything relating to his EC days actually did seem to give Al a small break from his troubles, at least I hoped it had. His daughter popping in for a few minutes probably did much more for him- I think he had her filling in blacks on pages. The studio was one wonder after another. This was the first time I ever saw an enormous Hal Foster Prince Valiant page on the wall, and really more incredible art than I’ve seen since, only visiting Howard Chaykin has come close. When King Features was just throwing out the original art to their headliners like Flash Gordon, Al had kept his best poker face and offered to get rid of some of those useless, worthless art boards. But he also had a trove of art his peers had given or traded him over the years. We talked about how great Terry and the Pirates was, I remember that. But then when it came time for him to get back to work, the walk through of happier times seemed to make coming back to the present that much more painful.

A few years later I got back to Al’s neck of the woods again and called to see if I could stop by. He had moved to another house and wasn’t working out of a home studio anymore, he had an office in the building where the magazine Highlights was made. The room he rented was stacked with books everywhere but where he sat and drew, not really anywhere for me to hang out. So we walked down to the nearby lunch place where he was clearly The Regular. It was a much happier day for him.

At some point he told a story about going with his mother to see Stewart Granger in a play. Scaramouche was one of Al’s favorite movies, but the connection was mostly from him being told all his life that he looked like Granger- which he very much did. They met briefly afterward in the autograph group, and Granger said something charming that I can’t remember now no matter how hard I try. This may have been where he said that was an exception and imparted the advice: Don’t Go Backstage. I think. I’m not sure I can trust my memory anymore, I’m so geared to putting things where they go in a better story order. If you don’t infer, he was referring to hunting down and meeting your heroes. I don’t know who all he had a bad experience with, though one was obviously Burne Hogarth, an infamous blowhard and Al’s teacher when he was very young.

The one who would have been the worst to go badly was Al’s greatest drawing hero, Alex Raymond. But that day at lunch, he told me about going out on his own pilgrimage to Raymond’s house and it had gone very well. Young Al was met at the door by a servant, which seemed right for going to see such a bigshot- I can’t remember how he got in touch with Raymond for the visit. The Society of Illustrators maybe? But apparently the titan who created Flash Gordon and Rip Kirby let Al stick around and ask questions for a couple of hours, though I think Al remembered being mostly quiet. Raymond invited him to stay in touch, but Al didn’t want to push his luck. Later he ran into one of Raymond’s assistants from that time who translated the experience for the unassuming Al; Raymond had been impressed with the young man and was interested in giving him work, had he followed up.

I can’t describe how wonderful it was to sit there in that cafe and hear Al Williamson talk about his brush with greatness while I was in the middle of mine. Talking about his hero made him wear that Stewart Granger smile, and I think I did correct him on his ‘backstage visit’ advice by mentioning that it worked out very well for me. I was of course waved off, Al was not going to let me put him on a pedestal. Some time later I got around that humble wall by writing him a letter telling how much that invitation behind the table still meant to me. You can’t wave off my sappy sentiment in a nice one-sided letter, all you can do is sit there and take it.

I don’t know how serious I truly was about working in comics that day of the Greensboro show – I loved them, but that was a point where I could have gone in many directions. It certainly wasn’t my major in school, and my father was not encouraging of something he’d never known anyone to make a living in. But after that meeting I went back and tripled my output of story pages. I stayed up late at night working on comics and always had new material to show at each comics show within driving range. And that range was the continental US, because the next couple of years I drove the 2500 miles to the San Diego Comicon. There are a few major road markers on the path of my life, and one of the biggest was put there by Al Williamson, just being himself. There will never be another like him.

Okay, I never do this anymore, but HeroesCon 2010 was the deal, so I need to write some of it down before I forget it all. Another triumph for retailer Shelton Drum!

I began the way I would end, incoherent, because I wisely chose to take a midnight flight across country. So if I seemed shaky to you, there we are. Thanks to Dustin Harbin, I was seated between Gabriel Hardman and Tom Fowler with Steve Lieber flanking the West wall, all my big collaborators of the past year. And did we remember to get a group picture taken with us as the Mount Rushmore of Awesome? No. And now all I can do is try to get Hardman and Fowler to go to the Baltimore show to see if we can recreate the scenario. As a result, a lot of Atlas, Mysterius, and Underground were signed and sketched in this weekend.
Friday night was productive- after I straight-lied to everyone about how I would see them in the bar later to drink up and be merry, I went to Lieber and Fowler’s room and worked on commissioned sketches with Steve while buddy Chris Kemple joined us to draw and watch The 40 Year Old Virgin. For some reason, the Canadian wasn’t overjoyed when he rolled into the room bleary eyed to find it full of us and every light on. I know, right?

Saturday I spent little time at my table because I had agreed to be on every panel that was put on. First was me and Ace Editor Bill Rosemann ostensibly talking about the upcoming Shadowland event that connects our books to Daredevil, but we quickly turned it into talking about how wonderful Thunderbolts is.

After this my friend Pat alerted me to the presence of a Bojangles in the convention center. Not two miles away, right there upstairs. I went and bought piles of their food, and rudely brought it to the Defective Comics panel run by cartoonist Ben Towle. I forget what the point of the panel was supposed to be, but what it actually was was Evan Dorkin rubbing ugly truths in the audiences’ faces while Colleen Coover and I tried to talk everybody back off the ledge. In theory Chris Pitzer was up there with us, but this has yet to be confirmed. Here’s a fairly accurate breakdown of that at the Westfield site.
The only thing keeping that from being a stupendous good time was the aforementioned Bojangles and the enormous sweet tea I’d been drinking during the panel. If I looked pained towards the end, that was why. I hope Chris Schweizer didn’t take my running out of the room as an indictment of his next presentation, which was probably terrific.

The last panel of the day was the Mondo Marvel panel, which Rosemann and editor Lauren Sankovitch worked wonders running. The outstanding costumes of the crowd were Hawkeye and Mockingbird and Truth-Captain America Isaiah Bradley. I can’t remember much about that panel now, but I think it was covered at Newsarama. I remember Jim McCann whispering and fidgeting so much that I almost sent him home. My favorite part was everyone who worked with Bill realizing he’d emailed us all the same article last week, which each of us took as individual criticism and suggestions on how to not be big losers.

As usual I fell asleep in my room immediately afterwards, text-beeped back to consciousness by Colleen and Paul Tobin so we could join Rosemann for dinner at the Mimosa Grille. Which, was delicious. We were a regular Algonquin Round Table, but with repartee that focused on Howard the Duck and 80′s comics in general. I had the trout.

This night I actually did head to the bar, first penciling a Prince Valiant piece in a sketchbook. People don’t ask for a Valiant every day, I wanted to make sure I got it right. Hardman appeared with his iPhone to give me the reference for Val’s chest insignia. Then I finally got to catch up another old pal, inker Rich Faber. Somehow in the midst of all this, we crammed in meaningful discussion. I didn’t realized that probably at that very second I was being sized up for… a hit.

A rift was nearly created among the people who bring you Comics Alliance when writer Chris Sims approached me in the Westin Lobby, smiling, a hand conspicuously in pocket. In the alternate Earth where everything went wrong, Mr. Sims was going to ice a bro. Said bro being me. At that moment his boss Laura Hudson slipped me the countermeasure, another bottle of Smirnoff Ice, which I can only assume is the modern equivalent to a sickly sweet Bartles n’ Jaymes wine cooler. If you review the rules over at BrosIcingBros, you’ll see that I could now ice-block Sims, and he would be obligated to take a knee and chug both warm drinks. Fortunately, this betrayal didn’t create a permanent rift, as Comics Alliance is running smoother than ever. Here, go watch their entire panel from the weekend.

I got to finally meet Chris Roberson, writer of iZombie in the flesh, and his demure, laconic wife Allison- quality people. Got to bed at three. By the way, there was a peculiarity of this wing of the Westin hotel, in that there was no cold water. I know that sounds like the most first-world complaint ever, but just imagine everything putting out hot water and I’m sure you’ll see some possible problems. For one, the showers were HOT. And the bathrooms could use VENTS. But, like the rest of the hotel, they have the best beds of anywhere. And that’s what counts most.

Sunday morning I woke up feeling fine, a testament to the fact that they really put no alcohol in those drinks at the Westin Bar. I went down to join Matt and Suzanne Wieringo, Kemple, Riches Case and Faber with Faber’s awesome girlfriend Christine and his supercute son Jason, Craig Rousseau, and expatriates of the tarheel state, my longtime friends Chuck and Marc Wojtkiewicz. This is informally the Mike Wieringo Memorial Breakfast, and thanks to Matt we had a room to ourselves to ramble on loudly and pretend that finishing with fruit absolved us of all the bacon.

The rest of the day blurred by, but I’m pretty sure I did a panel with Tom Spurgeon and Jonathan Hickman. Spurgeon you know as the Comics Reporter, arguably our greatest comics journalist if he could only use “who” as the relative pronoun when referring to a human. (But everyone seems dead set on using ‘that’ nowadays. It’s just like Streisand sang, folks. People. People WHO need people.) And those people listened to me and Hickman ramble on about working for Marvel, doing creator-owned work, and whatnot. Tom mentions it on his write-up, leaving me out like inconvenient history.

The aftershow gathering over at Heroes Aren’t Hard To Find was again the perfect way to end the experience. I got to catch up some with old buddy Richard Case and snottily judge many books on the shelf with Declan Shalvey. But straight up truth time; nothing beats listening to Sanford Greene tell Brian Bolland why one kind of southern barbecue is superior to another. This was after several of us were congratulating Brian on his eloquent take-down of Erro, the Icelandic Lichtenstein who has been making money off the works of ‘primitive comics artists’ by recontextualizing them for elite buyers.

I didn’t get to see the legendary art auction, but what I did enjoy was watching my artist pals make trades with each other. Everybody was very happy with their new art pieces without the pain of having spent money. But I think everyone agrees one of the best places to spend money was at Roger Langridge‘s table. I chided Alex Saviuk every time I went to the bathroom, and met Humberto Ramos. JonBoy Meyers promised me a free page. I got a new Kirby Krackle cd. I talked to a thousand people, and they were all friendly and cool.

Monday. Since no flight to Portland ever happens before 6pm from Charlotte, I got to go with Ford Gilmore to the Original Pancake House, worked a bit in the lobby, and jawed with Steve Niles who gave me a copy of Mystery Society before jetting off on his multi-state tour. Then I joined Fowler and studiomate Erika Moen to go joyriding around with creator Jason Latour, who-funfact- attended the same university as me. While discussing the soul food restaurants of eastern NC, I had the pleasure of reminding Jason of a large Faulknerian Man-Child who worked at one in particular. We hung out at a bakery-cafe that is a perfect place to write comics. Jason related the surreal moment of talking about James Ellroy’s fiction with Mick “Mankind” Foley.

And then bam- Erika and I rode to the airport in a pimpin’ towncar and it was all over. But it was great, and I’ll go again next year if they’ll let me.

YES! This weekend I’m able to return to the fabled and legendary HEROES CON in Charlotte, North Carolina! If you are at all within driving distance, you should go, you will not regret it. I’m sitting in Artist Alley 409 on the corner, conveniently by almost every artist I’ve worked with in the past year! And I should have nice hefty trades and hardback books to sign and sketch in. Here, this will orient you to bypass deserving talent and head Straight To Me…

And while you’re there, you might as well sit through some of the panels I’ll be on. You’ll be wanting a chair after a while. Most are on Saturday.

SATURDAY
1.30 PM
MARVEL: Shadowland
Room 208AB
It’s “The Battle for the Soul of New York”! An epic so big, that it will change the streets of New York City and the heroes that protect it forever! Join editor Bill Rosemann and writer Jeff Parker (Thunderbolts) as they talk about the fate of Hell’s Kitchen and the birth of a new major Marvel villain! Want to know how Spider-Man, the Thunderbolts, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and the Punisher are involved? Well here’s your chance to ask those questions and more!

*Hey, thanks for putting us up against Mike Mignola’s panel that I wanted to go hear! Oh well, Bill and I can plan out Thunderbolts.

3:00 PM
DEFECTIVE COMICS: A Celebration Of Superhero Oddness
Room 208AB
Let’s face it: superheroes can be kinda dopey. For every cultural icon like Superman or Spider-Man, there’s five thousand off-beat B-listers (Bwana Beast? Sonny Sumo? Razorback?) lining up to die in the next big crossover event. For Heroescon 2010, Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean cartoonist Ben Towle and Thought Balloonist blogger Craig Fischer host a lovingly critical look at just how bizarre the superhero genre can be.

The event will include a presentation by Towle on the sad-sack super-man in Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library; a panel discussion with Colleen Coover, Evan Dorkin, Jeff Parker and Chris Pitzer; a talk by Crogan Adventures creator Chris Schweizer about art-comix creators crossing over into mainstream superhero comics; and clips from some of the weirdest and worst superhero films of all time. Excelsior?

4.30 PM

MONDO MARVEL
Room 207BCD
From the Avengers to the Fantastic Four, the Ultimate line to the far reaches of the cosmos, answers to every corner of the Marvel U. and more are found here. This amazing panel with Editor Bill Rosemann features all-stars Jonathan Hickman (FANTASTIC FOUR), Christos Gage (AVENGERS ACADEMY), Jim McCann (HAWKEYE & MOCKINGBIRD), Jeff Parker (ATLAS), Paul Tobin (Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man), Associate Editor Lauren Sankovitch and more to field your questions!

I guess I just won’t be seeing my table Saturday afternoon.

SUNDAY

3.00 PM

IN CONVERSATION | Jonathan Hickman & Jeff Parker
Room 209
The Comics Reporter’s Tom Spurgeon sits down with Marvel writers Jonathan Hickman and Jeff Parker as they discuss maintaining personal vision working for one of the largest comics publishers in the world.

Ah, just one. Maybe I will be able to do some commissions after all. But probably not many.

Thunderbolts 144 hits shelves today! Thanks to all of you who have been posting online and tweeting about our new direction and the gorgeous work of Kev Walker and Frank Martin, we really appreciate it. Hope you all enjoy the ride that starts here. JP

And hotel-tenants everywhere are reading about it in their complimentary copy of USA TODAY.

I also talk to to Chris Sims at COMICS ALLIANCE, though they did not go with his original headline “Parker Tells Saturn to Eat Uranus.” And here for fun, the original rough I did that Terry Dodson snickered at before drawing his beautiful cover to issue 1.

One more thing- if you’re in the Portland area tonight, come over to the Things From Another World shop on NE Sandy Blvd. where Brian Bendis and I will be signing this and AVENGERS #1!

Hope you enjoy ATLAS 1 as much as we did making it.

One big fat solid book full of awesome GO GET IT!!!

A new Word Balloon interview! And this time John talks to me and Gabriel Hardman about ATLAS, and Planet of the Apes. Had we recorded this just a few days later, we would have probably talked about the late great Frank Frazetta, most likely. I’m currently looking for a frame to put my CREEPY cover poster with Wolfman fighting Dracula up here at the studio. Hope you enjoy.

And you can see how adaptable we’re making it for the various sets of readers over at COMICS ALLIANCE. Do judge a book by it’s cover.

Yes, I am briefly in my home state for the weekend and will be at ACME COMICS in Greensboro all day for Free Comic Book Day with the impressive line up of, in no particular order: Chris Samnee! Christos Gage! Jonathan Hickman! Chris Giarrusso! Evan Shaner! Kelly Yates! Jeremy Dale! Chris Fason! Michael Watkins! and once again, ME!

I hope some of you in the area can make it out, I’ll be dropping Bojangles crumbs all over Chris Samnee’s art and look forward to seeing you.

Hey, we’ve got some space to do a letter column in ATLAS 1, so if you have questions about the team, past stories, almost anything- post them here in Comments. Try to avoid “what will happen” questions please, they’re just frustrating for everybody. And leave your real name for the response!

Oh, why can’t we just change the title to that now? Over at CBR you can see some preliminary sketches and hear Kev Walker discuss his thinking on the new cast of THUNDERBOLTS.

Three issues, this Summer! Go read me speaking with Vaneta at NEWSARAMA.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s another piece with Dave Richards at COMIC BOOK RESOURCES.

This week I reteam with IG GUARA and for the first time with ZACH HOWARD to kick this event from FALL to WAR mode. And there’s some other notables in this book, like PAUL TOBIN and RAMON ROSANAS who you’ll need to see. It’s a good one, leave work early to get by your shop.

Contains the pivotal story moment where A-BOMB GETS PANTS.

… a lot of covers from UNDERGROUND and plenty of Gabriel Hardman art! Have fun spotting the differences between making comics and how TV depicts it. You can catch some of the footage through the link at Newsarama. Tune in tonight…

Comic Book Resources has some bits from WORLD WAR HULKS like this story that superartist Zach Howard and I did, which I personally title A-BOMB GETS PANTS. Also some great stuff by Paul Tobin, Ramon Rosanas, Scott Reed, Harrison Wilcox- go check it out!

Or really, everyone- Tom Fowler is heading over to the CBC studios to talk to the All In A Day show about Mysterius The Unfathomable, and I’ll be horning in via the tele-phone. You’ll be able to listen online here.

And why wait to hear Fowler dulcet tones? He just talked to Christopher Neseman over at iFanboy. Bonus points to the Don’t Miss Podcast for using Magical Mystery Tour as the lead in.