Mike Royer
Classic Bronze-Age Inker of Jack Kirby
Drawn to California in the spring of 1965 by the lure of a career in comics, Mike spent his first 14 years in comic books, comic strips and TV animation. Beginning as Russ Manning’s assistance on Magnus, Robot Fighter and Tarzan comic books and inking and penciling for Western Publishing (Gold Key) with such West Coast talents as Mike Arens, Sparky Moore, Paul Norris, Doug Wildey and several other stalwarts on the coast. At the end of his working relationship with Manning Mike lettered and inked the last 6 months of Russ’s Tarzan syndicated Sunday page and the first four months of the daily and Sunday Star Wars strip. His drawing assignments at Gold Key were on Tarzan, Space Ghost, coloring books, puzzles, and he wrote/adapted and drew Speed Buggy, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kids, Tarzan, Magnus and designed and executed covers for Hanna-Barbera TV Adventure Heroes, etc. Mike also found time to contribute to Creepy, Eerie and Vamperella magazines and began drawing the large one panel Crusin’ record album covers (over two dozen to date), many of which he scripted. He also laid out a full 1/3rd of the first Saturday morning animated Spiderman shows (which, since he worked at home, was denied screen credit on) and was even considered for the “voice” of Peter Parker/Spiderman.
For East Coast firms Mike inked such artists as Don Heck, Steve Ditko, Ramona Fraden, among others, but it is during the period beginning at the close of the 1960s that he is best known to comic fans for his decade as letterer/inker for legendary Jack Kirby at National and then Marvel. When Mike went to work for Jack, inking his contributions to Marvelmania (a L.A. based licensing/vendor) the “King” found someone that could make his wish of being, in essence, a West Coast D.C. office possible. His move to D.C. from Marvel was intended to include Royer as his letterer/inker but the powers that be at National objected. Finally, after the first few issues of Jack’s Fourth World books had seen print, D.C. finally agreed to let Jack have the inker on the West Coast. The editors at D.C. fully expected unknown (to them) Royer to fail, thus proving to Jack that his idea wouldn’t work. Mike didn’t fail. He may have had his detractors, but Royer is the only inker to keep up with the prolific Kirby, by lettering a complete book in less than two days and by inking three pages a day.
From late spring of 1979 Mike spent the next 14 years on staff as a product designer/character artist in the creative department of the consumer product/licensing division of The Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California. He performed in the area of book publishing, comic books and strips, all forms of theme park and licensed merchandise as an idea man, concept and final line artist and on rare occasions, inker. While at Disney Mike designed and art directed the Dick Tracy and 3-D Rocketeer Music Company comic book read-alongs. He created the “new look” that launched the massive international Winnie The Pooh licensing program at the close of 1993 and was featured in a 43 minute “How To Draw Pooh” video sent to over 40 licensees. He takes no small amount of pride in the fact that Pooh soon (and still) outsold Mickey Mouse worldwide. In June of 1993 Mike left his staff position at Disney to spend the next seven plus years as a full time independent contractor (free-lancing) for The Disney Store creative group, becoming their ” Pooh man” and creating many 3-D products utilizing the Disney characters.
In the spring of 2000 with the Disney Store spiraling into oblivion due to middle management created problems, Mike continued functioning as an independent art service, doing pencil work on a wide variety of projects which included creating orthographic turns and environment “floor plans” for computer animators on a Scobby Do(sp?) video game, Digimon character art, on screen icons for the old Fox Family Channel and Fox Kids Network, Reader Rabbit work books and even some Rescue Hero toy packaging, etc. At this time Mike and his wife, his sometime concept collaborator, returned to the state of his birth, settling in Medford, Oregon, and in the process even returned to his career roots with some inking assignments for such luminaries as Steve Rude and Eric Larsen on such characters as Captain America, Thor, The Fantastic Four and Savage Dragon. For a while Mike created Disney character art for limited edition collector pins (literally dozens) but Disney didn’t like him keeping his original art. He continues to accept commissions and does “recreations” of comic pages and covers for collectors.
He strongly believes that his passion, attention to detail and accuracy, and his commitment to integrity will keep him at the board for a long time to come. Let’s face it, although the carbon unit is a bit older, just ask him, between his ears he’s barely 30!
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