Roman Morales III worked as an artist for Greater Mercury Comics in the early ’90s after getting out of the Marine Corps. His work was published in Assassin Force #2 and in the Grips Special #1. He also did the portfolio artwork for the for the character Edge, who was covered in an earlier post. Grips had brought a lot of exposure to the talent of Mr. Tim Vigil (during the Silverwolf run), and being asked to work on such a title must have been a blast.
He went on to work on several other titles for other publishers over the years, including Lynch Mob, The 10th Muse, and even an issue of the X-men. He was a police officer for about a decade and a half, and is currently a starring member on Mun2’s spanish-language bounty hunter reality show Fugitivos De La Ley Los Angeles (Fugitives Of the Law).
Roman Morales III (center) with the cast of Fugitivos De La Ley Los Angeles
Roman is one of those artists that is very accessible to his fans, even posting his mobile number to his Facebook page and encouraging his fans to text or call him. He is also working on a follow up to the 4 issue Lynch Mob series published by Chaos Comics. Yes, issue #5 is in the works, check out the cover over at CAF or the color version at his own site, Third Empire Studios.
I had contacted Roman about doing a Grips ‘cover concept’ type of thing. One of the books Roman did for Greater Mercury Comics was titled Grips Special, a one-shot with a distinctive red cover featuring the Greater Mercury Comics flagship character in a Colosseum and a horse drawn chariot bearing down on him. Even for Silverwolf/GMC it was an odd cover, completely black & red; so being a one-shot and having a distinctive cover I was definitely interested in getting something that might be sort of like a companion piece to the original cover.
So, Silverwolf/GMC fans, here is a new piece of Grips art, by one of the original SW/GMC artists, Roman Morales III:
Original artwork commission from Grips Special #1 artist Roman Morales III
And so you can see the original cover that inspired the commission request, here is the cover to Grips Special #1:
When asking for commission, I tend to ask the artist to just do something like they would have been asked to do back then. For example, if the series ended at issue #6, I might ask them do something that could have been the cover for #7 or such. For this one I asked Roman to draw a reverse of the cover he did for the Grips Special, from the point of view of a chariot driver bearing down on Grips.
Now, let’s have a bit of fun. Roman was kind enough to include a copy of the commission with the distinctive red color, a la the original published by GMC. So I went one further and added the logo and all just to see how the piece would look as a Greater Mercury Comic Book. Here is the commission mock-up:
And another, with less border:
I was tempted to post this in a few days as an April Fools joke, but the problem is that there have actually been books found years later to have been published. Silverwolf and Greater Mercury both ended too soon, with at least one book already printed but never released (Fantastic Fables #2, aka Heart of Darkness). Other books are very scarce or only rumored to exist. So, such a joke might be funny to a few of us, but what about those who find the post a year or two from now? If anyone actually fell for it…it could drive them crazy for years looking for Grips Special #2.
Still, this was a fun afternoon, playing around in photoshop and making these mock-up covers and all. Roman, thank you so much for taking on the commission, the piece is great and definitely complements the Silverwolf/GMC collection. And also thank you for allowing me to share this with all the (few) others like myself who still have an interest in these comics from the ’80s and ’90s.
Links for Roman Morales III
THIRD EMPIRE STUDIOS: – Home of the Empire
Fugitivos De La Ley Los Angeles
Original Comic Art For Sale ~ Pencils & Inks
Roman Morales III (RomanMoralesIII) on Twitter
Comic Art Gallery of Roman Morales III at ComicArtFans.com
Also available for commissions and more. Or just drop him a line to say hello.
Roman is a good guy overall. Back in the days of MySpace though he had posted an infuriatingly bigoted blog-post about atheists which I tore him a new one over but after that we became pretty friendly. His artwork became so good after he left GMC that I am still amazed to this day that he isn’t working in the industry and instead makes his living doing tattoos. Lynch Mob #5 I believe has been finished for years now. He originally posted that cover (LM #5) and several pages of the interior at his MySpace page back in 2007 or so.
Grips Special #1 was a weird book. One of the few that Silver did not script and so was better written than 95% of what Silver published, but a printing error resulted in one or two pages being unreadable (IIRC an advert had somehow become superimposed over story page(s)). The red-orange color choice for the cover was just a mess. If they had gone with white or yellow or beige then it would have looked pretty good.
Having followed Roman via Facebook for a bit now, I actually find it refreshing that he speaks his mind. I might not agree with him, or perhaps I do (I’d have to see the Myspace post), but in any case the world we live in today lacks HONEST leadership. Roman has the grapes to speak his mind and stand his ground, and I respect that.
And remember, atheists can be bigots too.
This is ‘A Happy Place’ after all, so I say let’s just be respectful of each other and stick to comic books and such. 🙂
[Mod: EDITED / off topic]
But yes I have no interest in having this discussion at a site I go to to read about comic books I collect, so…happy thoughts. 😉