Michael Lark

This was done for me at Atomic Comics Free Comics day in
Mesa May 6 2006.

Micahel Lark was there with Ed Brubaker, his current partner in crime on
Daredevil. I had went through line and got both of them to sign the issues
of Daredevil that I had brought with me and was waiting in the side line for
Michael Lark to do sketches. While he was working on the one for the guy
in front of me, Ed Brubaker was signing comics for others. On several, he
not only signed the comics, but added extra dialogue for the characters on
the cover.

A while later, when my sketch was being worked on, one of the guys who
he had done dialogue for came back and started complaining. Ed had dialogued
a Captain America cover with Cap saying "You're dead!" and Crossbones replying
"Fuck you!". The guy came up and gave the comic book back to Ed and said he
didn't want it. He hadn't read the dialogue until he had gone away and had been
offended by the profanity on it. He started ranting about how he gave his comics
to kids after he read them and it was totally inappropriate that Ed would write
stuff like that when kids could see it. Ed apologized and said that he would never
write that on a comic for a kid, but since he obviously wasn't, he felt that it would
be ok. He offered to replace the comic and after a long rant, he accepted.

Both of them were quite stunned by the guy. While I think he had every reason
to object, he went quite overboard in the way he handled it as Ed had not given
it to a child and he was blowing things quite out of proportion. While Michael was
drawing the picture of Jessica Jones, he asked me if I found smoking to be
totally imappropriate. I said "Yes, but it's something that the character does, so
it's ok." So, that's where the caption came from.