Roger Brand | |
---|---|
Born | 1943 San Francisco, California |
Died | November 23, 1985 San Francisco |
(aged 41–42)
Nationality | American |
Area(s) | Cartoonist, Writer, Penciller |
Spouse(s) | Michele Robinson |
Roger Brand (1943–1985) was an American writer-editor-illustrator who created stories for both mainstream and underground comic books.
Brand grew up in El Sobrante, California, where he was friends with cartoonist Joel Beck. Both had many wild escapades while attending De Anza High School, and they remained lifelong friends. In the 1960s, Brand moved to New York City where he began in comics as an assistant to Gil Kane and Wally Wood during the mid-1960s, contributing to Wood's witzend and moving on to such publications as Creepy, Eerie, Jungle Jim and Web of Horror.
Dan Adkins remembered working with Brand:
I did a story called "The Haunted Sky". I'm not sure if that's a Creepy or Eerie story—but it was in one of the books, and I penciled the splash, and I didn't want to do the rest of the story, because I guess I had to do something for Marvel, so I gave it to Roger to finish. So "The Haunted Sky," which was printed in one of the books, is my splash, a story Archie [Goodwin] wrote for me about planes, that I begged him for, then I gave it back to him and screwed him, and Roger finished the story. So how much Roger helped me, I don't know. Roger did a few—oh, I know what he helped me on! He helped me on that anniversary issue, the 100th issue of "Sub-Mariner versus the Hulk", Tales to Astonish, I guess. Roger helped me ink that, we inked nine pages in a week... I don't know how I met Roger. Bill Pearson used to have an apartment that wasn't too far from Wally Wood... You'd meet all kinds of people over at Bill's place. I probably met Roger, because I also knew Michelle, his wife. So I met her over there.
Some of Brand's earliest work appeared in the early 1960s in UC Berkeley's California Pelican humor magazine, alongside drawings by Joel Beck. Entering the underground comics field, Brand drew for the tabloid Gothic Blimp Works and such titles as Banzai!, Blab!, Candid Press, Insect Fear, Real Pulp Comics, Tales of the Leather Nun, Tales of Sex and Death, Yellow Dog, and Young Lust.