Our Condolensces by Mark Heike

We at AC were very sad to hear of the untimely passing of artist Scott Clark just a few days ago, at the all-too-young age of 43. Although readers familiar with Scott’s work would undoubtedly think of him as an Image, DC or Aspen Comics artist (for his work on features like Stormwatch, Grifter, Deathstroke, Superboy, Green Lantern Corps, Batman inc. or Martian Manhunter) , there was an AC connection with Scott. Sometime in 1992 or 1993, our publisher Bill Black was a guest at a convention in the Tampa area. I must’ve had some sort of schedule conflict, because I didn’t attend that particular show. Well, as usually happens at conventions, Bill was approached by a number aspiring comic book artists looking to break into the industry through work with AC. Among them was a young fellow barely out of high school- Scott Clark. He left some photocopied samples of his art with Bill, and when the boss brought the samples back to the office after the show, we were all favorably impressed. I called him, and found Scott to be an exhurerant and enthusiastic fellow, raring to go on any assignment we had to give him. At that point, we were working on editorial material for the now-legendary AC Annual #4 (which focused on the Golden Age-revival characters, The Vault Heroes), and we realized that a planned Miss Masque story for the book needed some additional penciling. Anxious to put some work into Scott’s hands ASAP, I looked at the script and decided that the last page of the story was actually the easiest to prep, so we sent it off (with all needed reference on MM) to Scott immediately, with the promise that script and materials for the additional pages would be ready and go out to him once we’d seen his first page and deemed that acceptable. Well, within the week, we get a call from Scott. The good news is, he has the MM page finished, and was putting it in the mail. The bad news is, one of the other people he talked to at that same Tampa show was an Image editor, who had since called to start him off with a much higher-paying, higher profile assignment. Scott made his apologies that he would not be able to complete the Miss Masque story, which we understood completely. We’d both hoped that he might be able to do more work for AC at some point when his schedule cleared, but that was not to be. Once we got his penciled page in in another week or so, we were particularly disappointed, as it was very well-drawn. We went in a slightly different direction on the balance of the Miss Masque story, as writer Nick Northey, Chris Allen and myself actually teamed up on the art, although we did use Scott’s last page. I’m not sure WHY we never listed Scott’s name in the credits- perhaps because it was only ONE page, and we knew that the Image job he was doing was much better “promotion” for him in terms of getting him more comics assignments that our little Miss Mask story would be. In the end the whole story worked. But it was the last time any of us had any contact with Scott Clark, other than seeing his name in the credits on numerous comics for other publishers over the years. He seemed like a good guy, though- and he was definitley a talented artist. 43 is too young for anyone to die.