Bade Biker & Orson #1

Comic book, 1986

Full disclosure: I’m friends with the creator of this comic, Jim Lawson. But I was a big fan of his work a long time before we met, and I was very interested to see this extremely early instance of it. In what must be close to his first published work, Lawson shows an unexpectedly high level of influence from 70’s illustration like Sergent Pepper and Vaughn Bode. His high-waisted, long legged depiction of the human form has an undeniable weight and motion to it, showing Lawson to be a naturally gifted artist from minute one of his career. The story is fine, the typical case of an artist throwing their interests in a blender in their early work, but it has a lightness, in both content and storytelling (at least after we move past the exposition), that make it a pleasurable enough read.