What if you were married to someone who also worked in the comic book industry? For horror comic illustrator Andrew Mangum, that’s not a “what if” question, the man is living the dream.
You may have seen Andrew’s illustrations on the covers of Evil Ernie, Reanimator or the recent Aliens/Vampirella comic from Dynamite Entertainment, but the man has also worked for DC Comics, Dark Horse Comics, Image Comics and he has been working in the industry since 2001.
Andrew’s wife of 15 years, Danita, is a comic book writer (the couple has two children) and is one of the writers on the new Pink Panther comic over at American Mythology. But I’m not here to talk about fuzzy, pink characters, we’re here for blood ‘n guts and discussing the style of artwork that Andrew is known for.
With the recent release of Cavewoman: Lycan Run — in which the titular character has to deal with some werewolves, in addition to the usual dinos — Andrew was nice enough to walk me through the couple’s creative process.
“With Lycan Run, Danita and I came up with the plot together and sent it over to Kevin for the OK.” Kevin Alsop is the publisher for Cavewoman comics at Amryl Entertainment. “Then once we get the green light from Kevin, I go to work on pages. After pages are done, Danita goes back over the art and fine-tunes the script,” Andrew explains. Then the pages are sent over to George E. Warner, who does the lettering, based off Danita’s script, and puts the pages together to get ready for printing. Since most issues of Cavewoman are in black and white, only Andrew’s covers are colored by Gene Jimenez.
And if this book sells well? The creative team has some ideas for a Lycan Run follow-up, as well as some other one-shot stories. Devon Massey will still illustrate and write the regular monthly series. Much like myself, Andrew’s been a fan of Cavewoman comics for a long time. His love of the title dates back to when Budd Root still wrote and illustrated the series. Andrew hopes that Budd likes what he did with the character and that, “it means a lot to have my name on an issue and the covers I got to do before my issue.”
But Cavewoman isn’t the only character over at Amryl that Andrew likes and might illustrate. “I love the Razor and Morbid Angel books, back in the day. I have a story I want to do to show new fans how badass a ’90s bad girl can still be,” he says. Which is good, because it’s Kevin Alsop’s intention to have Andrew and Danita’s team re-launch the Razor title. You heard it here first, folks.
One day, the husband-and-wife team might just become a family creative team. Remember those two kids of theirs I mentioned earlier? Well, they’ve been getting into the comic book industry, too.
Andrew’s 17-year-old son, Gabriel, is also in the industry. Andrew lets me know that his son “did the story and art for a short in the new Gore Shriek and he worked on Hatchet #3, also some books at Zenescope.”
And as for their 13-year-old daughter, Ava? Not only is she a painter, but she’s also done background inks in some books and covers for the Puppet Master series.
So, not only are the kids into comic books, but they’re into horror comic books! Their dad must be really proud. It probably won’t be long until the family does an entire comic book together.
