spider-man – LeeFerguson.Art

ORIGINAL ART, SPIDEY STUFF, FREAK, FIRESTORM, BOWIE and more…

Well, well, well … here we are.

Hope things are good with you. This past week has been a crazy, stressful decade in the Ferguson household, but we persevere 🙂 And I have quite a bit to share this time, so let’s get started…

First off, I want to bring your attention to the fact that the ORIGINAL ART section of my website has been overhauled. Why? Because now the crew at PANEL PUNK ORIGINALS is handling my art sales, commissions, that kind of thing. I’m pretty excited by this, because while selling art and picking up commissions is obviously a big part of any art career, it also takes time away from … you know, actually making art! I never feel like I have enough time to do all of the things I want to do, and as a result, stuff like selling pages, etc., tends to suffer. But not any more! Do yourself a favor and check out PANEL PUNK’s website … I’ll post a link at the bottom of this newsletter (I spend too much time on this to have you bail on me right here at the start 🙂

Speaking of art … I did a few new pieces lately just because I felt the need to draw some Spidey villains. I guess there’s a new movie out or something, I dunno…

Anybody who knows me knows that I love Spidey (I learned to read before kindergarten only because I needed to know what was going on in all the Spider-man comics around my house…)

But if you’re interested in my take on a few classic Spidey bad guys, here you go…

First up … this guy.

The Vulture. Ol’ Adrian Toomes first appearance was in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #2, by Stan and Steve. I always dug how he was really just a cranky old guy with wings, but he could give Spidey (especially new-on-the-job Spidey) so much trouble 🙂

Next up…

The Rhino. His first appearance was in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #41, by Stan Lee and John Romita. It’s funny, since the first time I ever came across the Rhino in a comic, it was actually a reprint of some issue of the Hulk … I only associated The Rhino with Spidey because of the reruns of the old cartoon (which, yes, of course I loved as a kid 😉

The Scorpion. Mac Gargan’s first (in-costume) appearance was in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #20, by Stan and Steve. I think the first time I ever came across the Scorpion in a comic, though, was actually a Marvel Tales reprint of issue #145, which starts a really fun two-parter by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru, a team I really loved…

(More on that below…)

The Grizzly first appeared in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #139 by Gerry Conway and Ross Andru … and yes, of course he’s great! I’m a huge fan of the Conway/Andru stuff, and we all know if Sony were serious they’d stop trying to make the Venom-verse a thing and just build around THIS guy 🙂

I mentioned above that I’ve done a bit of writing lately … I don’t know if I’ve said anything about this before (and I don’t feel like going back through past newsletters to check) but I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a sequel to FREAK. For anybody who doesn’t know, FREAK was a book I wrote, drew, colored and published at Image waaaaay back in 2004. Thanks to a miscommunication the print date ended up being two months sooner than I’d expected, so the whole book became a mad dash to the finish line…

And since I’d never written OR colored a real comic at that point, well … there were a lot of sleepless nights. Also a lot of learning on the fly. I’m proud of the accomplishment, but there are plenty of things with the art and story that I flinch at whenever I take a look back … but then I’ve also always wanted to finish this story. I had planned to do quite a few books following this character and his world back in the day, but now I don’t really see that as being necessary (or as something that I’m even interested in.) But I do want to finish this, and along those lines…

Well, I have an 80 page script sitting here, waiting to be drawn. It’s a first draft, and there are things I need to add and change (hopefully there are some bits I can condense or remove because 80 pages is a lot of drawing 🙂 but I’m reasonably happy with it at this stage. I’m not sure if I want to pitch this somewhere, Kickstart it, or publish it online … but I’ve got time to figure that out.

Looking back at my old work there, though, has made me think a bit (okay, a lot) about how we grow and change as artists with time. Sometimes it’s just part of our natural growth as an artist (or as a human being) and other times I guess it’s more … forced? That sounds wrong. How about … intentional.

And when I look back on FREAK and wonder if I’d want to go through all of that again, I think about this quote from David Bowie:

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

Yeah. I mean … what am I gonna add to that?

Go make cool shit. Push yourself. Scare yourself. Surprise yourself.

Something else I haven’t mentioned since it happened … is the passing of Gerry Conway.

Man … that’s rough. I never got to meet Mr. Conway, but it’s no exaggeration to say that he had as much influence on my love of comics, and thus my career, as any artist has. As much as I love the classic Lee/Ditko stuff, as much as I love the Stern/JR Jr stuff … it was Gerry Conway’s run on Amazing Spidey, with artists like Romita, Kane and Andru, that cemented my love of the web-head.

Not only that … but man do I love Firestorm. I didn’t have a comic shop in my small town as a kid, so I only caught the occasional issue here and there, but it was the one DC book that I’d immediately grab if I spotted an issue in the wild. I’ve actually been working to put together a run of that 1982 series, issues 1-100, and at the moment … well, I’ve got 83 of them, as well as a couple of the annuals. Getting there.

I can’t wait to sit down and read this entire run.

Thanks for everything, Mr. Conway.

I should mention that I’ll be doing a con this fall … if you’re going to be in the Orlando area, stop by!

Okay, before I go … my wife keeps reminding me that I need to mention the big bunch of collected editions on the way which somehow include my work (sometimes quite a bit, sometimes just a little…)

ULTIMATES BY DENIZ CAMP VOL. 4: UPRISING – Aug 12, 2026

GENERATION X Epic Collection: Counter X – Nov 3, 2026

RUNAWAYS By Rainbow Rowell Omnibus – Jan 12, 2027

PREDATOR KILLS THE MARVEL UNIVERSE OMNIBUS HC – Jan 26, 2027

…and apparently, this came out a few months back? I dunno … I haven’t seen it.

AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. Omnibus – Mar 31, 2026

Anyway, if you want any of these … well, I probably won’t have any copies 😉 Make sure to let your local comic shop know!

Okay, that’s it for this time … thanks for reading, and here’s that promised link to the PANEL PUNK site! My work should be available soon … if it’s not yet at the time I post this 🙂 Please consider signing up for the newsletter, since that will be the best way to keep up with art drops, commission openings and more!

https://www.panelpunk.com/collections/lee-ferguson

Best,

This One’s About Sal

As a really little kid, my comicbook reading was a bit haphazard … I lived with my grandparents most of those early years, and both of my uncles would have comics lying around the house. Thus, I don’t really remember ‘buying’ comics when I was little (or having them bought for me, I guess) … comics were just always around! Mostly Spider-man stuff, with some Hulks thrown in for good measure…

Anyway, the first Sal Buscema-drawn comic I remember coming across was PETER PARKER, THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN #19…

And just barely! Looking back, it appears THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #181 came out that very same month, and checking the publication dates, THE INCREDIBLE HULK #225, which is the first Hulk comic I remember ever reading was apparently already out and heck, may have even been in our house, waiting for me to find it…

I was really young and dumb, and these comics just appeared around our home. I had no idea how you got a comicbook. Maybe Stan Lee came in the night, dropping off issues of MARVEL TALES to the good little boys and girls? That would explain why I didn’t wake up to find comics of my own…

But I own all three of these, now. Coverless, beat to pieces, re-read a million times. They may have belonged to one of my uncles, but they stayed with me.

And yeah, this issue of Spidey really stuck with me … I still smile when I go back and look at it. Sure, Sal’s later Spidey stuff was spectacular (sorry), but I loved even his first go round with the web-head…

So over the years, as I fell further and further into the brain-rotting world of comicbooks, Sal was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. Not only was he a staple on THE INCREDIBLE HULK…

But he was prolific enough that he might appear anywhere else along with his regular duties on ol’ greenskin.

Oh, hey … weird fact. I LOVE the U-Foes. Because of these comics.

So yeah … Sal was there from the beginning. When I fell in love with comics, he was at ground zero.

It was pretty wild then, years and years later, when Chris Ryall asked if I would be interested in penciling a DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS series…

With Sal Buscema inking.

I mean, OF COURSE I said yes! I have NO IDEA why Chris thought of me for this one … I’d done some IDW stuff before, like the SNAKE EYES miniseries that came out around the first GI JOE movie, but really … there had to be plenty of guys interested in drawing D&D, and especially if it meant they’d get to work with Sal, right? So I don’t know how I ended up with the book, but I do know Chris was maybe just as excited as I was to have Sal on the project…

(And yes, Chris has turned me onto ROM. I missed it when it originally came out, but I’ve been reading the collected editions recently…)

Not long after, I got the script and set to work…

Doing my best (which wasn’t good enough), trying to make D&D fans happy and show Chris that he made the right call. I was pretty excited to see what the inks were going to look like…

And then a few weeks later, I got an email from Chris. He passed along a phone number and told me that Sal wanted me to call him.

My heart sank. Was I about to get ripped a new one by one of my heroes..? I was pretty sure I was. I hadn’t done a ton of stuff yet, but I’d been in comics long enough to know that sometimes you’re better off dealing with people via email … or not at all. It seemed like people usually got on the phone for the bad news.

And let’s face it. I was working hard, but I knew damn well Sal could pencil AND ink this thing on his own and it’d look 100% better. Maybe he was just gonna make sure I was aware of that fact.

“Kid, you suck, and even I can’t save this sorry excuse for a comic!”

But I called him, prepared for the worst.

And now, when I look back on the books I’ve worked on, the places we’ve gotten to visit, the people I’ve met in this crazy business … those phone calls with Sal are one of the very BEST things about my time in comics. Because that first call was just that … the first one. We’d end up talking pretty regularly throughout our time on D&D. He’d give me a call, ostensibly to talk over the newest pages I’d sent him, but really … our calls went all over the place. From art to Marvel in the 70’s and 80’s to bowling to never retiring because why stop doing something you love just to sit around..?

Oh, and the reason he’d asked me to call him that first time? I was using some crappy paper that wouldn’t take his quill very well. He was having a rough time with it, and asked if I could switch to another brand of paper. I’d only really been penciling up to that point, so I had no idea I’d drawn that first batch of D&D pages on something half a step up from toilet paper and then sent it to a legend.

Anyway … since he had a ton of other responsibilities, Chris wasn’t able to stay on D&D for long and had to pass the editorial reigns along to somebody else. Then soon after that, it apparently became a thing where I could no longer just FedEx pages to Sal for him to ink … he had to get set up with a printer so he could take the scans and print those out to ink the final couple of issues over blue lines. He didn’t really want to do that, and at one point told me he was going to just go ahead and leave the book … but I managed to talk him out of that in one of our marathon phone calls. I hated the thought of Sal feeling pushed off a project over shipping costs. Eventually, one of his sons helped him get set up. It worked out alright in the end … and it meant we had reason to keep giving each other a call. And anybody who knows me is probably laughing right now, because they know how much I hate to get on the phone for any reason!

But all I can say in my defense is … this was Sal Buscema 🙂

On one of those calls, I remember being really frustrated with something in the script … not that there was anything wrong with the script per se, just that I wasn’t figuring out how to set up the page or scene properly. How to tell the story. Sal told me to stop being so hard on myself, and to trust my gut. He said that I was really good at this, and that I needed to have more faith in myself. Now … I don’t even remember what part of the story I was struggling with at that time, but I remember Sal saying THAT. When Sal Buscema tells you that you belong … well, you gotta believe the man, right?

Eventually, we wrapped up the D&D thing. We talked a few times after that, but I tried not to bother him with too many random phone calls. I mean, between his other projects, his family, the bowling, the dozens of other things he filled his time with, the last thing I wanted to do was pester the guy. I’d drop him emails on his birthday or when I came across something I thought he’d get a kick out of, and then about, I dunno, eight or ten years ago or so, he agreed to ink me on the covers for a series I was going to be doing. I was pretty excited to reunite with him, but then it turned out … while I was drawing the interiors, I wasn’t going to be doing the covers…

Ah, comics.

Anyway … last spring, I think I shared this thing:

It’s a beast of a book, collecting all of the Spider-man stuff Sal did with JM DeMatteis, one of my favorite writers. Another creator I’d love to work with someday. It’s a great book, and in my opinion, it’s the best work of Sal’s career…

Think about that for a minute. This collects the run from 1991 through 1994. Sal was in his late fifties when he was doing this. He’d already drawn a million comics. He could have been coasting.

But he was doing the best work of his life instead.

That’s inspiring, right? I think so.

So when the news came that Sal had passed just a few days short of his 90^th, like everyone else … I was sad. Hell, I was heartbroken. Whether we had talked recently or not, I hate the thought of a world without Sal.

But as I went and started reading through some of his work that evening, I found myself smiling. That’s the thing, I guess. Whether it was through those phone calls or all the work he left us, I think about Sal … and I smile.

Best,