Mike Ploog
Michael G. Ploog (/pluːɡ/; born July 13,[2] 1940[2][3] or 1942)[4][5] is an American storyboard and comic book artist, and a visual designer for films.
[7] He began drawing while a young child, his imagination fired by such old-time radio dramas as Sergeant Preston of the Yukon and Gunsmoke, and such thriller anthologies as Inner Sanctum Mysteries and Tales of Horror.
[7] After his parents divorced and sold the farm when Ploog was about 10 or 11 years old,[8] his mother took the children to live with her in Burbank, California.
[11] Moving to the Hanna-Barbera studio the following season, he worked on layouts for the animated series Motormouse and Autocat and Wacky Races, as well as "the first Scooby-Doo pilot; nothing spectacular, though.
[11] A Hanna-Barbera colleague passed along a flyer he had gotten from writer-artist Will Eisner seeking an assistant on the military instructional publication PS, The Preventive Maintenance Monthly.
[12]Eventually, at the suggestion of Eisner letterer Ben Oda, Ploog broke into comics at Warren Publishing, doing stories for the company's black-and-white horror-comics magazines.
Ploog then helped launched the initial Johnny Blaze version of the supernatural motorcyclist Ghost Rider, in Marvel Spotlight #5 (Aug. 1972), and drew the next three adventures.
Anyway, when Gary Friedrich started writing Daredevil, he said, 'Instead of Stunt-Master, I'd like to make the villain a really weird motorcycle-riding character called Ghost Rider'.
I said, 'Yeah, Gary, there's only one thing wrong with it', and he kind of looked at me weird, because we were old friends from Missouri, and I said, 'That's too good an idea to be just a villain in Daredevil.
I had this idea for the skull-head, something like Elvis' 1968 Special jumpsuit, and so forth, and Ploog put the fire on the head, just because he thought it looked nice.
[18]Ploog and writer Gary Friedrich collaborated on the first six issues of Marvel's The Monster of Frankenstein (Jan.-Oct. 1973), the initial four of which contained a more faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley's novel than has mostly appeared elsewhere; comics historian Don Markstein said, "It was faithful to the story even to the point of leaving the monster trapped in the ice at the end — so of course, the fifth issue began with him being rescued.
"[19] In a 1989 interview, Ploog said, "I really enjoyed doing Frankenstein because I related to that naive monster wandering around a world he had no knowledge of — an outsider seeing everything through the eyes of a child.
"[11] The following year, Ploog teamed with writer Steve Gerber on Man-Thing #5-11 (May-Nov. 1974),[15] penciling a critically acclaimed series of stories involving a dead clown, psychic paralysis in the face of modern society, and other topics far removed from the usual fare of comics of the time, with Ploog's cute-but-creepy art style setting off Gerber's trademark intellectual surrealism.
[20] Moench's script was eventually published as a 106-page story illustrated by penciler John Buscema, inker Rudy Nebres, and airbrush colorist Peter Ledger as the three-part "Warriors of the Shadow Realm" in Marvel Super Special #11-13 (Spring - Fall 1979).
[21] Marginalia includes some work for Heavy Metal magazine in 1981, and three "Luke Malone, Manhunter" backup features in the Atlas/Seaboard title Police Action #1-3 (Feb., April, June 1975), the first of which he also scripted.
By his account, he has worked in post-production on the movie Ghostbusters ("All that stuff you saw on cereal boxes are my paintings")[11] and with film director Ralph Bakshi on the animated features Wizards,[22] The Lord of the Rings,[22] and Hey Good Lookin'.
He was production designer on Michael Jackson: Moonwalker (1988),[23] and has storyboarded or done other design work on films including John Carpenter's The Thing,[24] Superman II,[25] Little Shop of Horrors[26] and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and, he says, several Jim Henson Company projects, such as the films The Dark Crystal[26] and Labyrinth and the TV series The Storyteller.
[27] Between movies, Ploog illustrated L. Frank Baum's the Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1992; ISBN 0-7567-6682-6), a graphic novel adapting The Wonderful Wizard of Oz creator's 1902 novella.
