I met Larry Guidry years ago at a local convention. It was at a convention I’ve talked about before, it was the one that I got the email from Mike Zeck telling me my friend and co-creator on Diebold, Brian Clifton, had died. It was also the convention that I reconnected with Robby Musson after years, and not realizing he was an artist. I did something at this convention that I had never done before and that I’ve never done since. I put up a sign on my table saying that I was looking for artists to work with. Looking for artists is a never-ending quest.
Sometime during the convention, I looked up from my table, and Larry was standing there. He introduced himself and said he was an artist. We talked for a while, and I took his contact information. And from that, our friendship was born.
Larry loves golden age and silver age comics. He LOVES Herbie. We went back and forth on a bunch of different projects. We settled on one that I thought had potential. I sent him pages. He didn’t send me anything back. I think he finally sent a page or two, but it was taking forever. To be honest, Larry’s heart wasn’t in the subject. It started with an old public domain character, but he wanted to keep it in the silly style it was created in, and I was trying to update it.
Larry started going to conventions with me. It was cool having someone to travel with and split the costs. Even though we didn’t have anything to show for our work, it was good to have him with me at cons.
We talked a lot about comics during these trips. Somewhere on one of these trips, the subject of Fatman the Human Flying Saucer came up. I think I mentioned it first, for some reason, I had picked up the three issues of the character when it came out in the sixties, and still had a weird fondness for the character. He was the goofiest character, even then he was a step away from what I was reading, the Marvel universe of characters, but I had never completely forgotten him. Larry, of course, knew the character and all the background behind it. If it were the golden age, character Larry probably could tell you everything you needed to know and even what you didn’t need to know about the character.
Larry started doing new ‘re-creations’ of old superhero covers. What I mean by that is he would create a new cover for a Justice Society cover that never existed and sell them on eBay. He loved that time period of comics, and he loved those old characters. One day, I saw a cover he did featuring The Fat Fury, Herbie’s superhero identity, in battle with Fatman the Human Flying Saucer. It’s the piece of art at the top of this column. (I should say here that Herbie is Larry’s favorite character in the world. When I say Larry loves Herbie, I can’t stress enough how much Larry loves Herbie!)
That cover grabbed me. There was something about that cover I couldn’t let go. I loved it. I wanted to create the story behind that cover. He even created a logo for the non-existent comic Two Tons of Fury. It was perfect. I wanted that cover.
I actually asked if he still had the cover, and I would buy it, but it sold quickly and was gone to some lucky collector.
One of the next phone conversations Larry and I talked about was that cover. I told him how much I liked it. I wanted to write a story based on it. Luckily, the characters are in the public domain. So in the next week, on my day off, I brought my stand out to my porch, turned on my speaker, and Bluetoothed it to Slow Trains, Bob Dylan podcast, and started writing. By the end of the day, I had the story finished. Now that might sound impressive, writing an entire comic book in one day, but I’ll tell you it’s not the norm. It’s happened maybe once or twice more, but the norm is usually me struggling over days and weeks, and worst case scenario, months, trying to get a script written.
This one came together so easily. I took the concept from the cover and crafted a story featuring Fatman and Herbie in addition to some more public domain characters. Another one of those goofy comic book characters I remember fondly from the sixties was another version of Captain Marvel, besides the DC/Fawcett and Marvel versions. This one was an android that yelled “SPLIT!” and his body came apart. I know, I know, completely ridiculous, but like Fatman, he stuck with me over the years.
I sent it to Larry, and he loved it! And we found something out. When Larry liked a concept, he would draw the pages. He started drawing the pages. He would add little bits throughout the comic that helped make it funnier. We sent it Damian L Felitte to color it. I told him I wanted it to be colored like a comic from the sixties and he did even better than we could have hoped for. He actually colored the pages so they had that aging brown look comics from that time period get. If you didn’t know better, you might think this was actually an unknown comic from the sixties.
The comic was published through Die Bold Comics, and we sold it at conventions. The comic did well at cons, especially from a certain segment of the fan population. Older fans who remembered these characters loved the idea of the comic. I made posts on social media promoting the comic. Ben Dunn from Antarctic Press saw the posts and contacted me, wanting to publish the comic. The Die Bold Comics version has gone through three printings so far. We created a new cover for the last big print run we did, and plans are to do another cover for another print run soon.
It came out in Exciting Comics #31 from Antarctic Press, which was cool. Antarctic Press is one of the oldest publishing companies in comics outside the Big Two. They’ve been around since the 90s. Ben wanted us to do a crossover with his character, Tomorrow Girl. I mentioned how the first Two Tons was written in a day, well, I wish I could say the same about this next one. It took me forever to write. I’m ashamed of how long it took to write. I had about half of it done fairly quickly, but for the life of me, I just couldn’t finish it. It was a 48-page story that brought in some more public domain characters like Atom Mouse, and was a meeting between our two heroes and Tomorrow Girl. When I finally finished it, I sprinted the last half in a day. Finally, I was able to get all the pages to Larry. Now, Larry wasn’t sitting around waiting for the complete script. He was working on the pages he had, so at least we weren’t losing too much time. The first half of this story is in Tomorrow Girl #9.
We’re also working on another new story featuring our Two Ton heroes. Hopefully, Ben will want to put this out through Antarctic Press, and we’re talking about Kickstarting it beforehand. I really would love to do a regular Two Tons comic, I think it would be a lot of fun. Who knows, honestly, when I did that first story based on Larry’s cover, I never thought beyond that. I figured that was it, but those characters just won’t leave me alone.
The final cover. I wanted the background orange just to jump out and I remember a lot of covers from that time period to be really bright and weird background colors. I still love that cover.