More dispatches

Met Mike Grell again after 20 years in SDCC. He remembered his visit to Singapore in 1987 when he was an invited guest of the 2nd Singapore Comics Convention (nothing to do with the recent STCC organized by Play Imaginative). The other guest was Todd McFarlene, pre-Image and Spawn and then just known for his Batman: Year Two, Hulk and some issues of X-Men. Grell was the hotter artist then, having just finished The Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters deluxe mini-series (that's what they called it then, ie. for matured audiences only). I interviewed the both of them for BigO magazine.

Of course, fortunes changed and McFarlene is the multi-millionarie (still) and Grell, well, I heard he does some really beautiful commissions through his website.

Coda: I interviewed McFarlene again some 10 years ago over the phone for a story I wrote for 8 Days about the release of the Spawn movie. He remembered he was a young punk then when he visited Singapore in 1987.

As for Grell, after his visit to Singapore, he wrote a Blackhawk story that was set in the Lion City.

http://www.fortunecity.com/tattooine/niven/142/opinion/opi30.html

Here's someone else's recollections of those days:

chekyang.com/musings/tag/mike-grell/

There was also a Wolverine story set in Singapore in the late 1980s, but for the life of me, I can't remember which series was it or who wrote/drew it.