My name is Mark Poe, I'm a Professional Graphic Artist and have been for more than 20 years.

Current Projects: megacomicsgroup.com, artmarkings.com, megagraphicart.com
Comics: Project: New Man, Humants, Mega Tales, Quantum Mechanics, Mega Mascots

Welcome! To give you an idea of why I'm like I am, my list of often imitated, but always fallen short of influences:

Cartoonists: Jack Kirby, Wallace Wood, Alex Toth, Alex Ross, Bruce Timm, John Byrne, Jim Lee, Arthur Adams, Walt Simonson, Bruno Premiani, John Buscema, Mark Schultz, Dave Stevens, Steve Rude, Howard Chaykin, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Jim Steranko, Jim Starlin, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Charles Shultz, Bill Watterson, Jay Piscopo, Charlie Parker, Scott R. Kurtz, Brad Guigar,Dave Kellett and too many more to list here.

Writers: Jack Kirby, J.R.R. Tolkein, Jules Verne, H.G.Wells, Lester Dent, Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Kurt Busiek, Arnold Drake, Roy Thomas, Gardner Fox, Bill Finger, Ray Bradbury, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Steven Speilburg, Freazie White, Jr., Greg Legat, Marcus Lusk and too many more to list here.

More Reasons

My true calling has always been that of a cartoonist. What follows here are some of my past comics work, especially with my friend and business partner, Freazie White, Jr. (pronounced Fray-zee) and friends that helped us.

A Little History

Freazie and I met years ago as members of an Amateur Press Association (APA) called Alpha-Omega. Freazie read one of my submissions titled Razor's Edge, a synopsis for a new book I was working on, and maybe even the first chapter, I don't recall right now. Freazie loved it and called me up. We hit it off and began working together on Razor's Edge. Freazie was penciling and rewriting it to fit the comic book format. I inked his work and we began submitting the pages to Alpha-Omega. These were fun days and we learned a lot. From there we started publishing Small Press comics under the name of Magi Graphics. I'm a little hazy on the details now, Freazie may have to correct me in his blog if he recalls, this was back in the early 80's. I think Freazie had previously published Capt. Testament and we revived that title which grew into The Humants (hu-mants). We worked on those characters in the small press until about 1991, then we began planning to move into the Independent Comics market.

I had some previous experience with this market during the Black & White Boom brought on by Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles initial success. I did some work with Marcus Lusk and Greg Legat at Marcus's Dimension Graphics on a parody title we called Elf Trek. Marcus had already had success with his one-shot Secret Doors. Both of those titles sold several thousand copies before the Black & White Boom went bust.

Late in 1991 Freazie and I published Project: New Man under the Legacy Comics banner. We didn't even sell a quarter of what we expected based n my experience with Dimension. We were not discouraged but we retooled out plans on our next book. Instead of 2 titles we would combine Project: New Man in our planned titles of The Humants. The first issue of The Humants was a whopping 68 pages! We saved on printing costs but again, as with most independents after the Black & White Boom, orders were low. Still plodding on and doing everything we could to get some exposure we finished and released The Humants #2 which also continued a Project: New Man story but we cut our pages down to 48. In the summer of 1992 we made an 18 stop Comics Convention Tour all over the eastern U.S. from New York to Ohio to Georgia and lots of states in between. We had a great time and met a lot of wonderful fans, convention promoters, retailers and talent both established pros and beginners.

We were beginning to build a small fan base but the fans were having trouble getting copies of our books. We learned that retailers, after the Black & White Boom, would not take a chance on unknown titles and this trend has continued and even gotten worse until the present. I don't blame them really, they lost a lot of profit on speculating on independents. Many told us they did not have time to read a copy of each book that was solicited so it was a gamble to order most independents unless there was something like established talent they could use as a selling point. Actually even established talent has not always been successful with distribution so at least we had good company even if misery doesn't love company. We tried to come up with a way to entice the retailers with freebies, posters and other stimulus packages. Nothing seemed to work. Out of money and with nary a profit in sight we had to shut down our operation. It was one of the toughest decisions of our lives. We had most of Humants #3, ready to go and 4 & 5 were already in various stages.

Now What?

16 years after Legacy Comics closed it's doors we're back at it! This time under the label of Mega Comics Group the publishing arm of Mega Graphics, LLC. So what has changed in that time? Well, just about everything.

After Legacy closed up shop Freazie opened up his own comics shop, Collectors Mania. He built that up then sold that first shop and started over. Now he has about a gazillion comics and he sells a lot on eBay and off his web site www.comicattic.com.

I went back to doing commercial art for various businesses and eventually ended up going out on my own with a Graphic Art studio to do freelance work for my own clients. My web sites are www.megagraphicart.com and www.artmarkings.com.

All this time both Freazie and I have kept note books and making plans that maybe someday we could get back into doing comics. Now with comics moving to the web as I detailed in my initial blog, now we begin. Who knows where we'll go from here?

Right now we want to re-present our previous material leading up to presenting some all new characters, concepts and story lines we hope will be well received. We hope you will have as much fun reading these tales as we have putting it altogether. Let us know what you think.