When I decided to introduce a home front story arc into Funky about his wife Holly completing their son Cory’s comic book collection while he was stationed in Afghanistan, I knew I wanted to show a bunch of the comic book covers in the Sunday strips. Since it was going to be several covers and since I didn’t care to get sued by either DC or Marvel Comics, I decided to use some superhero characters that I had created when I was in the fifth grade. It was obviously one of my more prolific periods because there were a lot of them, folks. And then I thought, and this is the second best part, why don’t I ask some of my favorite comic book artists to bring my characters to life by creating the covers for me? Why that idea is so crazy that it just might work… and it did! Spectacularly! The covers that resulted were simply amazing and ranged from the star spanning Starbuck Jones to the elusive and mysterious Blue Astra. I called them Batom Comics because that was what I had called my comic book company back in the sixth grade.
And now comes the best part. Heritage Auctions, the premier auction house in the world for this type of graphic art, has agreed to auction off all of the covers and donate the entirety of the proceeds to the Lisa’s Legacy Fund for Cancer Research created by University Hospitals in Cleveland. If you saw the covers when they ran in the Funky Sunday strips, then you know just how cool and beautiful they are, but if you somehow missed them (and what’s up with that?) you’re going to get a second chance. All of the covers have been cached on this website in a section that we’re calling the Komix Korner Gallery or just Gallery on the menu bar. Starting today, we’ll begin showing you the covers again one at a time so you have time to properly savor each one. We’ll be uncovering a new cover every two weeks until all of the covers created by the titanically talented twenty Batom Bullpenners stand revealed just prior to the Heritage’s auction that will be taking place on November 16th and 17th in Beverly Hills and online.
It’s a great feeling to think that those characters from way back when are going to make a real world contribution to the fight against cancer. To learn more about the Lisa’s Legacy Fund, go to Lisa’s Legacy on this site.
