Student Work

Back when I was in high school in a small Catholic school in Ohio—I'd taken all the art classes that were offered and still wanted more. So they let me design my own independent study. I'd get shuffled off to the art annex and work, usually alone, while my teacher, Mr. Frank Daniel, would check in a couple times each period.

The room was full of art supplies and filing cabinets stuffed with old student work from years past. At one point, Mr. Daniel told me I could go through it—help him clean out. I was sorting through drawings when I found it.

A page of figure studies. Maybe two dozen people jumping and twisting through the air. Just an exercise in understanding the human form. And I knew immediately who had drawn it.

I'd seen hundreds of this artist's drawings. His style is incredibly distinctive— especially the way he draws bodies in motion, a specific energy.

I brought the drawing to Mr. Daniel.

"Who drew this?" I asked.

"Oh, that. That's old student work." he said.

"Was his name Mark Bagley?" I asked.

"Oh! How do you know Mark?" he said.

Famed comic artist Mark Bagley recently came out of retirement to reunite with Brian Michael Bendis for Bendis' big return to Marvel comics in Avengers #800.

At the time I was discovering a drawing that he had done in high school wedged in a cabinet in my high schools art annex, Mark was drawing one of the biggest books in the comics industry: The Amazing Spider-Man. He's drawn countless issues across multiple titles. If you read superhero comics in the 90s and 2000s, you knew his work.

And Mr. Daniel had taught him years earlier at a different high school across town. He and I, evidently, had the same high school art teacher.

I ran the drawing through a scanner—this was back when getting an image from the real world onto your computer still felt kind of like magic. I can't find the file anymore, but I remember we did a crappy printout on my home printer and brought it to show my local comic shop. They put it up on their wall with a little sign: "Rare Mark Bagley Art."

Years later I met Mark at a convention and told him this story. He got genuinely excited and asked me to thank Mr. Daniel for him and he drew me this.

I've never seen Mr. Daniel again or Mark again, but you can see some of Frank Daniel's art here, Mark Bagley's art here, and mine here.

I think about this stuff a lot while working on my graphic novels—the weird connections, the unexpected threads that weave through the creative world.

What a weirdly connected place this is.