A One of a Kind Guy

So I'm still looking in my office for a rock concert poster when I come across the illustration to my left: Duck Dogers. It's by Mahlon L. Fawcett. Lonnie to his friends and it's one of the many illustrations that Lonnie gifted me over the years.

Lonnie first came into my circle of friends during the Mayhem days (No, I wasn't ripping bodies apart, Mayhem was a comic book I was co-producing at the time). My partner, Baron Mrkva, and I sent some artwork and ad copy to a local shop for Mayhem #1 and this huge, hairy, wild-eyed maniac comes running out of the back room, going, "You guys got a book? You really got a book?" Lonnie and Baron and I became instant friends.

Lonnie even bumped another of our friends off the back cover of Mayhem #2 with a great cloud-city, spaceship kinda thing which you can see to my left. This is a good example of the kind of energy and guts Lonnie had with his art. Baron and I noticed some heavy black lines in the yellow trail coming out of the ship on Lonnie's piece and we took it to him and asked if he would take out the black. Instead Lonnie grabs this heavy red marker and began making the swirling red pattern on the trails you see today. Both Baron and I had eyes bulging out of our sockets when he did that, cause at first it looked like he was going to ruin the piece. But Lonnie had amazing confidence in his own work and the result, as you can see, was great. Lonnie is creative as hell, and undisciplined as the day is long, but when he does settle down and draw, he is a wonder.

Lonnie was also one hell of a model maker. Lonnie bought models but didn't build what is in the kit. Instead he used the parts in the kit along with index cards, paper, bottle caps, and anything else he could find to build something truly unique. His apartment always smelled of burning plastic since one of his joys was melting model parts with a cigarette lighter to create something new and unusual.

Lonnie also did some work on another comic book that I had a small part in, Wild Think. My Mayhem partner Baron Mrkva and a good friend, Burt Griswold ran Wild Think. I was there, but I put up no money, so had little say in the final book. I think we were all over at Lonnie's small apartment one day when he pulled this piece out of a pile sitting on the floor by the chair he always worked in. It was so striking that Burt wrote the scene into the first issue of Wild Think because we had to use this cover.

The last time I saw Lonnie was a few years ago at the San Diego Comic-Con. He was working in the Jim van Hise booth. Lonnie did some work over the years for Jim, but other than that never really made much of his art. It is truly a shame as the guy can draw like a bat out of hell!