MICHAEL WHELAN • MISSILE COMMAND: ALPHA WAVE by Michael Whelan...

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MISSILE COMMAND: ALPHA WAVE by Michael Whelan (date uncertain).

Here’s another curiosity found in the studio, one so obscure I had to ask Michael for background and even he wasn’t sure of the details.

His initial response was that it was an unpublished advertising piece done in the ‘70s for Neal Adams’ studio. The style suggests that but the date written in the margin of the painting is clearly after his arrival in New York when he worked with Neal. Further, the arcade version of Missile Command was released in 1980 with console versions hitting in 1981 for the Atari 2600 and 1982 for the Atari 5200.

After some back and forth, here’s what Michael thinks:

When I first started out, there was a couple who offered to sell my sketches at their dealer table at conventions in the late '70s. They sold several sketches and prelims I otherwise would have tossed out. The Missile Command piece may have been one of those. I’m thinking that perhaps the date was in reference to when I gave it to them, or when they gave it back to me, rather than the date it was painted. Hard to say.

It was a quickie of a job done via Continuity Associates, which was the name of Neal Adams’ studio then. It’s not the sort of assignment I would ordinarily have taken, but I owed Neal for helping me land my first book cover assignment with Ace Books, so I was happy to do it.

Maybe someone like DC was trying out the concept of publishing comics with stories and characters inspired by different video games? That kind of tie-in might have been an attractive proposition, but one that eventually fell through? I’m just guessing.