Whatever Happened to: Mischa McDowell (aka Michelle Bryant)?
While doing these annotations, I noticed a name I wasn't familiar with in the credits on Valor #14: Mischa McDowell, on inks over Colleen Doran. I looked her up in the Grand Comics Database, and I saw that her only credits (at least under that name) were Valor #14-19, and one Star Wars cover. Essentially her entire career was inking Valor! I liked the way her inks looked over Doran's pencils, so I attempted to track her down to see... whatever happened to her?
Here are some selected sample pages from her run on Valor:
I started with Colleen Doran herself, I asked if she remembered working with McDowell.
I'm still in touch with Mischa. She was wonderful on the book, and we were one of the only all-woman art teams in mainstream comics at the time!
— Colleen Doran (@ColleenDoran) November 29, 2021
In a non-stalker method, I tracked down McDowell (now Michelle Bryant), and when I told her about the podcast and my desire to find out more, she was delighted to provide me with the following (links and cover dates in brackets are from me):
I wanted to be a comic book artist since I was very young. I was a kid in the 1980s, and it was unusual then for a girl to be into comics. My mom would buy them for me at garage sales, and that’s probably where my interest started. I used to bike to the local convenience store for new issues and would occasionally beg a ride from my dad to the comic book store downtown. I spent hundreds of hours reading them.
My high school in Madison, Wisconsin had a senior-year program where you could apprentice with an outside artist. I knew that Steve Rude of Nexus fame lived in town, so the program coordinator contacted him on my behalf, asking if he would be my mentor. Steve is a really nice guy and an incredible artist. I learned a lot from him, and we’ve been friends now for 34 years.
I then started college in Bloomington, Illinois where I met Steve Bryant (author and artist of Athena Voltaire) when he was working at a comic book store. He introduced me to a local group of artists (including Tim Bradstreet, now widely known for his comic book covers) who did illustrations for local gaming magazines. We sold our art at numerous conventions including the early years of Gen Con.
A couple years later, I very nearly got my first break. Jill Thompson, a friend of Steve Rude’s, had given me photocopies of her pencils from Sandman. She liked the resulting inking samples I sent her, and she was about to start work on DC’s series Black Orchid [issue 1 cover dated 9/93]. The book’s editor liked my work, but he was hesitant to put an unpublished artist at the beginning of the run. We left it with the understanding that I would start a few issues in, but it never did happen.
Steve Rude also introduced me to Colleen Doran. I already loved Colleen’s series A Distant Soil and was familiar with her work. This connection led to my being brought in as inker for DC Comics on Valor issue #14-19 [cover dates 12/93 to 5/94]. I worked on the series through the summer [1993] and moved from Wisconsin to Arizona in between issues. Once I got to Arizona, the editor told me that FedEx had lost the pages for the next issue. This excuse kept up for the next couple weeks until I called Colleen who was very surprised and told me that the pages were with another inker; it turned out that I had fired. I was never told. I understood their decision as I had missed a couple of deadlines, but if I had known in advance, I wouldn’t have incurred the expense of moving.
Over the next few months, I sent many inking samples to various comic book publishers in search of work, but I didn’t find any. This was also right around the time the comic book market went into a steep decline. I eventually ran out of money and moved back to Wisconsin. After that, I did receive a call from an editor at Dark Horse Comics who had seen my samples in their archive. He liked my graphic style and offered me the covers on Classic Star Wars: The Early Adventures #7 and #8. I did do #7 [cover date 2/95], but the penciller chose to ink his own work on #8.
That was the last comic book art I did. After that, I worked as a picture framer and a book binder, as well as a stained glass artist and lampworker, making and selling over a million, little glass beads. A couple years ago, due to health reasons, I quit hot glass and moved into online reselling, especially vintage and antiques. Writing this reminds me: I still need to sell most of my original comic book art from Valor.
I love what I do now as it’s endlessly interesting, and it involves a lot of photography which is what I went to college for in the first place. Would I go back into comic books if given the chance? I would need a lot of practice to get back to where I was, but yeah, probably. That dream never dies. :-)
You can find her online stores for "What's Gone Around" on eBay, Etsy, and Mercari.
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